compacting/expanding lists

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dennis Osheim
  • Start date Start date
D

Dennis Osheim

Hi,

I'm a newbe to this group - if this question has been answered already, let
me appologize.

Background:
I'm trying to use excel to organize a set of rules for nets used in
designing printed circuit boards.
Some of these nets form buses (e.g. data(0), data(1), etc...) - these are
simply groups of related nets.

Currently I have a particular column that has a netname followed by columns
for rules. There is
one row per netname in the current implementation. If a rule applies to a
net, then there is a "X"
character appears in the cell at the intersection of the netname row and
that rule's column.

Problem:
If all nets in a bus (group of nets) have identical rules, I'd like to find
a way to compress the list of
netnames into a single line rather than having one line per netname. I'd
like there to be some indication
to the user that this netname is special such that the user would know to
[click on it?] to expand all of
the individual nets (essentially adding a bunch of rows with individual
netnames that were previously not
visible) or clicking it again and making the individual netnames disappear
and just the bus name remain.
There, additionally, needs to be a method of checking during the colapse of
individual nets into the single
group name - namely that all of the netnames that are being colapsed have
indential rules.

If you're dealing with 32 ro 64 bit buses - It's very difficult to visually
verify that every bit has exactly the
same set of rules applied...

I've seen this behavior on non-excel spreadsheets that are embedded in some
CAD tools. Is there
a way excel can mimic this behavior?

Thanks.

Dennis.
 
Hi Dennis
one way would be to use an additional column as helper column to
identify identical rows.
Assumptions:
- column A stores your netname (starting in row 2)
- row 1 stores the rule headings (ranging from B1 to N1
- I use column O as heper column.

Add the following formula to O2
=SUMPRODUCT((B2:N2="X")*(2^(COLUMN(B2:N2)-2)))
copy this formula down for all rows

Now you can sort by this column. Alls rows with an identical value in
column A have the same set of rules
 
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