Tracking unused data combinations… (All)

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Valued members of this board,
this might not be a true technical Access (or Excel?) question, nor an ethical or critical (it’s actually just could be fun), but in case any of you creative minds populating this lounge might provide me some usefull idea’s…

I think about storing some kind of lottery participation data in a database: participant + numbers chosen. The numbers aren’t actually numbers and far from randomly chosen: they represent sportsmen chosen by people for their ‘team’. (They’ll gain points in races and the person having the most successfull team wins.) Now here’s my question…

Would it be possible in Access with some query combination/code to trace interesting number-combinations which aren’t chosen yet?
I’ll probably limit the numbers I’m interesting in (to, say, about 20).
Further I’ll probably assign the numbers a value which allows sorting & filtering on the number’s importance (like: only look at combinations with at least/exactly 2 ‘important ones’).
So I have also some idea’s in my mind. But… any further suggestions are welcome!

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Okay, I am attaching a sample db, to do what you want. There is a Participant table and a combo table. The combo table has three fields, to represent ‘three’ participants. Rule #1, the participants have to be entered in the table in numerical (ID) order, from left to right.

Then there is a qryCombinations. This simply shows all combinations of three participants from tblParticipants. It does not show duplicates (ie, 1,2,3 will show up, but then 2,3,1 will not, it does this by making sure that the second ID is greater then the first, and the third is greater then the second. It also makes sure that slot 1 doesn’t equal slot 2, or 3 (prevents 1,1,1)). Now, you have a query with all possible combos (with ID values left to right of smaller to larger) and a tblCombos, with the same ‘sequencing’, the last query shows the combinations ‘possible’ which have no matching records in the actual Combo table.

Hope this helps….

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Drew,
thanks, really, for your time! This could probably help a lot – I’ll try it out this weekend.
Hasse

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Drew,
thanks, really, for your time! This could probably help a lot – I’ll try it out this weekend.
Hasse

Reply | Quote

Okay, I am attaching a sample db, to do what you want. There is a Participant table and a combo table. The combo table has three fields, to represent ‘three’ participants. Rule #1, the participants have to be entered in the table in numerical (ID) order, from left to right.

Then there is a qryCombinations. This simply shows all combinations of three participants from tblParticipants. It does not show duplicates (ie, 1,2,3 will show up, but then 2,3,1 will not, it does this by making sure that the second ID is greater then the first, and the third is greater then the second. It also makes sure that slot 1 doesn’t equal slot 2, or 3 (prevents 1,1,1)). Now, you have a query with all possible combos (with ID values left to right of smaller to larger) and a tblCombos, with the same ‘sequencing’, the last query shows the combinations ‘possible’ which have no matching records in the actual Combo table.

Hope this helps….

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