Sort Columns with multiple values in cells

My columns are labeled A B C D etc... If the product I am creating the table for falls into one of those categories I place a 1 in the cell. For instance, ProductA falls into the A and B categories, so column A will get a 1 and column B will get a 1. This is so I can sort all of category A's Products etc...

I am looking for a formula to put in a column that would Say what categories ProductA falls into. ie Since ProductA falls into the A and B catergories but not the C and D catergories, This final column would say something like AB, or A,B or something.

Alternatively, I could make a single column entiltled 'categories' and put something like 'A B' in ProductA's column. In this case I would need a way to sort all A's or sort all B's and not just sort all 'A B'

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Might be an idea to post a sample workbook.

You can create the category list in F using something along the lines of

=TRIM(REPT(B$1,B2)&" "&REPT(C$1,C2)&" "&REPT(D$1,D2)&" "&REPT(E$1,E2))

In terms of "sorting"... ignoring the above, you can apply a Basic Auto Filter to row 1 and then filter by Column as desired
(note however that with Auto Filter the filters are essentially "AND-esque" ... ie C = 1 AND D = 1 ... you can't have C = 1 OR D = 1 for that you'd need a column like the above (ie contains C or D))

Originally Posted by XL Help Files

REPT Function

Repeats text a given number of times. Use REPT to fill a cell with a number of instances of a text string.

Syntax

REPT(text,number_times)

Text is the text you want to repeat.
Number_times is a positive number specifying the number of times to repeat text.

TRIM Function

Removes all spaces from text except for single spaces between words.

TRIM(text)

Text is the text from which you want spaces removed.

In the case of REPT the positive number is determined by the number in the appropriate cell (a blank will be seen as 0). The TRIM will remove the unnecessary spaces resulting from the concatenation.

Based on your file

F3: =TRIM(REPT(A$1,SUM(A3:B3)>0)&" "&REPT(C$1,SUM(C3:D3)>0))
copied down

in the above case we're using the boolean output of SUM(cells)>0 as the "positive number" in the TRIM...
this we can do because Boolean TRUE will be equated to 1 and FALSE to 0 in the TRIM function

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