Math : cubic area formula?

[tekkendork]

I am trying to generate an infographic that shows the size of a cubic stack of money.

There will be various sums of money ($1.2 billion, $47.6 million, etc.) so I'm hoping to create the formula in Excel and just plug-in the different dollar amounts for the results.

A U.S. bill is .0043 inches thick (.10922 mm), 6 inches wide (152.4 mm) and 2.5 inches tall (63.5 mm)

So a stack of one thousand $100 bills ($100,000) is 4.3 inches thick.

If I'm displaying a single stack, it's not a problem. But I want to have multiple stacks (say a 5-stack by 5-stack array) so the money amount will look more like a cube than a giant, single column.

This is what's giving me trouble. How can I create a formula to see how big a cube of x number of dollars would be?

This was the help I received on another forum, but I can't figure out how to tweak it to get results based on a specific dollar amount:

a cube is a volume that is equal on all three sides (it has the same depth, height, and width) based on that, I've created an excel calculation that takes the dollar amount of bills, and uses the goalseek command to find the cubic size of the bills. since the bills themselves aren't cubic, I've added a calculation that returns the real size taken by the bills. (bold underline text is only for reference, and not a part of the equation)

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to use this, you can provide an inch measurement in B2, and it will spit out how much will fill that cubic volume, or you can goalseek in whatever dollar amount you want (by selecting the appropriate set cell in column G) and selecting B2 as the changing cell. alternatively, you can erase the HWD values in B2:D2 and use your own dimensions (e.g., 10 high, 20 wide, 15 deep)

It looks like this would work, but I can't determine the steps in red

Anyone have any ideas or another suggestion?

Thanks

[shg]

Here's a closed-form solution. The US GNP (~$10T) is equivalent to a cube of ones 720 feet on a side.