hi,

im well aware that you cant nest more than 7 If statements but i cant find a way around this problem. all i need to do is get excel 2003 to read the contents of a cell and then depending on what it finds in there to run a simple equation and display the results. heres a small example of my spreadsheet :

A B

1 Y =IF(A1="Y", $u$5+I27, IF(A1="R", $F$15+I27, IF(A1="RYY",
$F$15+$u$5+$u$5+I27)))
2 R

3 B

where Y=yellow, R=red and B=blue, column A1 will include Y,R,B,YY,RR,BB,YYY,RRR,BBB,YYR,BBY and so on until column A1 is displaying every combination of these letters possible. as you can see this wouldnt be a problem if i could just paste a ton of "IF's" in there, ive tried using VLOOKUP and OR but i cant make these work and im not aware of any other functions that can help.

thank you for your time, im sure someone with a huge brain will solve this in about 3 seconds