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Good afternoon all, I've been using Stack Exchange on a school site, and found it very helpful. Hopefully my question will be topic appropriate and well phrased.

I am a Project Manager for a Lighting Distributor, and we often need to figure out the number of fixtures of a nominal length to use for a run (ie under the cabinet lighting). The trick is to get a combination of fixtures that is 0 < length < 6 inches of the total length of the run.

Working in Excel, I would like to input the nominal lengths available (A, B, C, D) and figure out the best possible combination of fixtures.
For example:

RUN = 61

A = 12
B = 18 
C = 24
D = 29

OUTPUT = A (+1), C(+2)

I'm sure this has to do with factorials and nCr, but I haven't used these formulas since high school and I'm a bit rusty. I'm also having trouble figuring out how to link the cells in Excel correctly, so if you know the correct way to do this in Excel, thank you! But I will try to find answers in an Excel-specific forum as well.

Cheers!

Erin

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    This question is off-topic here. The part of your question about how to implement your algorithm in Excel would be valid on SuperUser. The part of your question about the algorithm itself would be valid on Software Engineering.
    – Jan Doggen
    Commented Mar 26, 2015 at 8:33
  • 3
    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it belongs on SuperUser and Programmers
    – Jan Doggen
    Commented Mar 26, 2015 at 8:34

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