Comments on: Conditional Formatting and Noncontiguous Ranges

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 19:05:00 +0000

This is great stuff…

By: Kanwaljit

Kanwaljit — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 10:41:00 +0000

Hi Dick,

Try laurent laungre's "Join Array" function. That might be of help.

Find the same at
Laurent Longre http://xcell05.free.fr

By: Gary Waters

Gary Waters — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 00:12:00 +0000

Dick,

I noticed an error in my function, the formula should be:

=SUMPRODUCT((MOD(ROW(EntireGrid)-2,4)=0)*(MOD(COLUMN(EntireGrid)-2,5)=0)*(LEN(EntireGrid)>0)*(EntireGrid=B1))

By: AJP Excel Information - Su Doku puzzle | Excel Blog

AJP Excel Information - Su Doku puzzle | Excel Blog — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 01:34:00 +0000

[...] I also found a Sudoku puzzle solver at Office Online via Daily Dose of Excel. [...]

By: Gary Waters

Gary Waters — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 01:33:00 +0000

Dick,

I don't know if this will help (I have not messed with Soduku yet), but to mimic countif(Grid1,B1), I used

=SUMPRODUCT((MOD(ROW(EntireGrid)-2,5)*MOD(COLUMN(EntireGrid)-2,4)=0)*(LEN(EntireGrid)>0)*(EntireGrid=B1))

since your Grid1 cells are evenly spaced along the rows and columns. EntireGrid is a defined name range =Sheet1!$B$2:$L$10 encompassing all the Grid1 cells.

By: AlexJ

AlexJ — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 16:55:00 +0000

Dick,
I don't have a solution to your contiguosity problem, but I have two ideas:
1. Would some of the fancy SUMPRODUCT with double minus signs work on non-contiguous ranges?
2. How about building a named formula with relative references as the input formula in the conditional format equation? (Haven't tried this myself).

HNY to all the DDE blog folks!

By: Andy Miller

Andy Miller — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 15:31:00 +0000

Wow. That is an interesting one.

I haven't had much luck so far, but have found that you can use =INDEX(grid1,,,1) to iterate through the cells in the range (e.g. =INDEX(grid1,,,2), etc.). However, I haven't been able to combine it with anything useful so far.

By: doco

doco — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 06:53:00 +0000

When you get that solved, try the 15×15 SuDoku puzzles?

I too have been recently bit by the SuDoku bug and solved most of the puzzle reasonably rapidly (about 8 to 10 minutes each) in a little stocking stuffer. So, I went to the internet to look for a 'free' generator for puzzles and fount those 15×15. I literally went crosseyed - Yikes!

By: RJS

RJS — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 06:08:00 +0000

You could write a user-defined function for just the counting of the non-contiguous range of cells that match the criteria:

Function CountifNC(rInputRange As Range, sCriteria As Single) As Single

Dim i As Integer
Dim c As Range

i = 0

For Each c In rInputRange.Cells
If c.Value = sCriteria Then i = i + 1
Next

CountifNC = i

End Function

The formula for the conditional formatting of course becomes:

=OR(ISNUMBER(B2),COUNTIF(Row1,B1)>0,COUNTIF(Col1,B1)>0,CountifNC(Grid1,B1))

I could only get it to work if the user-defined function was the last argument passed in the OR function.