From the course: Excel: Advanced Formulas and Functions

FACT - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel: Advanced Formulas and Functions

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

FACT

“

- [Instructor] Let's do some statistics. We're not going to get deep into it, but I just want to show you more about what Excel can do for you on an advanced level. Here we have these musicians and instruments, Hector on guitar, all the way through to Christiano on keys, and Zack on percussion. Question: how many bands can we create from these six people and musicians? Let me move this out of the way, and you can too if you follow along. All right. We got permutation one would have Ardit on guitar, Tabby on vocals, Christiano on bass, Zack on drums, Hector on keys, and Portia on percussion, right? And yes, there's this background assumption that everybody can play all of these instruments. Alright? And so we got three different permutations of these six people and instruments. Here is how we do it. I'm going to go to sheet one here. We got six band members, six instruments. Alright, so the first thing that we can do, we understand that we need a factorial. We need one times two times three times four times five times six, okay? We want all of the possible arrangements and there are no repeats, meaning that we won't have Portia twice. Also, we won't have any instruments missing that we won't pick three out of the six. We want every rearrangement of the six. So factorial equals fact, and you see returns the factorial of a number equal to 1, 2, 3 times the number. Double click fact, that's what we want. And the number and enter. 720 possibilities. Okay. We can also do this: equals sequence. Double click how many rows we need? Six rows. And the rest of the formulas arguments are optional, I don't need them. Close parentheses, enter. All right, we've got one through six. Go to the formula bar and wrap this in product. Okay, product multiplies all the numbers as given arguments. Double click product, go to the end, close parentheses and enter. There's our 720 again. So this was with the factorial function. This is with product and sequence. And then there's one other way that we can approach this. Equals permutation. We want permut, return the number of permutations for a given number of objects that can be selected from the total objects. Okay, so I'm going to double click. The number is six comma, the number chosen, we want six. Close parenthesis, enter, and there is our 720 again. So those are three different ways that we can figure out how many different variations on those six members that can be created. And because I have a heart the size of a bathtub, check this out, what I did for you, I went and got all of the 720 possibilities just for you. Wow. Merry Christmas. So right here we see we have Tabby on guitar, Hector singing, Ardit on bass, Christiano on drums, Portia on keys, Zack playing percussion.

Contents