Excel expert advice needed

[LottoMatic]

I am looking for the advice of experienced Excel users regarding the "translation" of a web-based application into an Excel spreadsheet and really hope to get some useful input regarding this matter.

Since year 2014 I've been working on a rather complex lottery prediction system. It is a web-based system (PHP/MySQL) and lately I was wondering if similar results could be achieved with Excel. That would make the application portable and internet independent.

What my system does, in a nutshell...
It wheels trough all possible combinations of a certain lottery system (e.g. 6/49) and it eliminates any combination that doesn't meet certain criteria. To establish the criteria, a relatively large number of filters (hundreds) are being applied to each and every combination individually. This means quite a lot of computing power, considering the fact that there are -- for example -- almost 14 million possible combinations in a a 6/49 system. For a 7/50 lottery system (such as the Canadian Lotto Max for instance) there are almost 100 million possible combinations.

A detailed description of the system can be found by googling "lottomatic number generator". I did read the MrExcel board rules and I believe I am not braking any of them.

So, my question is:

Would it be possible to achieve something similar to that (or better?) using Excel?
I just thought it would be wise to ask the experts before actually rolling my sleeves up and starting to work on this.

Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Rijnsent]

Hi LottoMatic,
something in that direction sounds doable with Excel, but:

• you'd probably want a lot of VBA for that, as millions of normal excel calculations would probably crash/freeze excel. Maybe combine Excel with an Access database for faster queries and base data (also portable) would do the trick.
• my feeling: it feels a bit like the question: "can I build a house with only logs and a swiss army knife". Yes, you could and probably can create a great Youtube video out of it, but it's faster/easier with some powertools .

Cheers,
Koen

 

[LottoMatic]

Hi Koen and thank you for your input.

That is my main concern actually, the fact that excel, by itself, may not be able to compute the millions of calculations needed, especially for a lottery with a relatively large number of possible combinations.
As for the Access DB, I understand how that would make things a lot easier. However, my goal (advice request...) would be to achieve all this with Excel alone.

Building a house "with only logs and a swiss army knife" is something I did already. And although it turned out well, I am not sure I'll be taking on such task again though I tend to put that experience in the once-in-a-lifetime category.

Let's see if someone else will come up with some idea.

 

[Ficspartner]

I am looking for the advice of experienced Excel users regarding the "translation" of a web-based application into an Excel spreadsheet and really hope to get some useful input regarding this matter.

Since year 2014 I've been working on a rather complex lottery prediction system. It is a web-based system (PHP/MySQL) and lately I was wondering if similar results could be achieved with Excel. That would make the application portable and internet independent.

What my system does, in a nutshell...
It wheels trough all possible combinations of a certain lottery system (e.g. 6/49) and it eliminates any combination that doesn't meet certain criteria. To establish the criteria, a relatively large number of filters (hundreds) are being applied to each and every combination individually. This means quite a lot of computing power, considering the fact that there are -- for example -- almost 14 million possible combinations in a a 6/49 system. For a 7/50 lottery system (such as the Canadian Lotto Max for instance) there are almost 100 million possible combinations.

A detailed description of the system can be found by googling "lottomatic number generator". I did read the MrExcel board rules and I believe I am not braking any of them.

So, my question is:

Would it be possible to achieve something similar to that (or better?) using Excel?
I just thought it would be wise to ask the experts before actually rolling my sleeves up and starting to work on this.

Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Hello Lottomatic Id like to know if there is a site you know of which gives Canadian lottery results in a downloaded format for excel ?
Thx.

 

[montecarlo2012]

VBA itself is powerful. The number of combinations is not the problem, plug-in conditions either, the algorithm is the challenge, you must be more specific and clear in your request.
A code for example that avoid certain sums, the amount of evens and odds, gives you frequencies in different ranges, a code that gives you the skip report, all 6 trend lines, hit ratio, expected hit, the longest time a number disappears "all that and more is already done in VBA with a really very small code".
How you Present your situation or question, is the real problem.
And here I believe with the years I have here, is about excel questions, No promoting another website.