Lottery Numbers

Hi,

Im trying to get Excel to display all possible combinations of lottery numbers in a pick 7 out of 47 style lottery.

I dont want randomly generated, I want all possible combos.

So line 1, cells A-G would be

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

then
1 2 3 4 5 6 8
1 2 3 4 5 6 9

to
1 2 3 4 5 6 47
1 2 3 4 5 7 8

etc....

Any help?

Well, what I would do with it is none of your concern! I would use it for my own nefarious purposes.

Just kidding.

My friend seems to think that he has the lottery figured out. I know, I know... but he seems to think so. He wants a paper list of all combinations and then he can start eliminating the ones he doesnt want.

I told him that he's looking at 67 million possible choices, which is a lot of numbers to crunch through, but he is adamant that he can do it.

Storage is not a problem, and it doesnt necessarily need to be A-G over and over, it could be A-G until 65535 and then I-O until 65535 etc.

I was just wondering if it could be done.

I did the first 64K combinations on one worksheet-- it required 4MB to store. If that scales, it would require 4GB to store the complete file, but Excel would run out of memory long prior to finishing. Know what I mean?

Originally Posted by shg

Welcome to the forum.

That would require about 440 million cells, filling about 960 sheets on columns A:G, and require maybe 1GB to store.

What would you with it do once you had it?

If my formula is corrrect namely
Nrofcomb of m numbers n by n =fact m/(fact(n)*fact(m-n)) I get somehing like 63 million combinations

I believe there are 62,891,499 combinations, you can get that number with

=COMBIN(47,7)

but assuming that each combination takes 7 cells to display, i.e. one number to a cell then that gives 440 million as shg says

I was merely thinking of one combination per cell