excel name formula?

  • Thread starter Thread starter mhuntoon
  • Start date Start date
M

mhuntoon

Please don't laugh. I'm trying to come up with a name. It can be either
male or female, but it must consist of only 5 letters and one of those
letters (and only one) must be a "y". I've searched online for baby name
finders, but they only allow you to choose the 1st (and in a few cases the
last) letter of the name, not the letters in between.

I've been giving this some thought for quite awhile now, and I figure that
there must be a way to accomplish this using Excel. Even if the names are
complete nonsense, I can sort through and delete those leaving only the
handful remaining.

I know this must sound crazy, but how can I get Excel to generate such a
list of 5 digit words (names) in which one and only one letter is a "y"?

Thanks,

Dazed and confused
 
Sally.


mhuntoon said:
Please don't laugh. I'm trying to come up with a name. It can be either
male or female, but it must consist of only 5 letters and one of those
letters (and only one) must be a "y". I've searched online for baby name
finders, but they only allow you to choose the 1st (and in a few cases the
last) letter of the name, not the letters in between.

I've been giving this some thought for quite awhile now, and I figure that
there must be a way to accomplish this using Excel. Even if the names are
complete nonsense, I can sort through and delete those leaving only the
handful remaining.

I know this must sound crazy, but how can I get Excel to generate such a
list of 5 digit words (names) in which one and only one letter is a "y"?

Thanks,

Dazed and confused
Click to expand...
 
How long do you want to spend sifting:

4 non-y letters plus 1 y gives 25^4, or 390,625 permutations. Is that
really the best use of your time?
 
Hi JE!

Isn't it 390,625 * 5

But they may have quite a few months wait until they need it if it can
be male of female.

--
Regards
Norman Harker MVP (Excel)
Sydney, Australia
(e-mail address removed)
Excel and Word Function Lists (Classifications, Syntax and Arguments)
available free to good homes.
 
Yup - I was gonna put that in after I nipped off to XL to get the 390K,
then forgot. Thanks for the correction!
 
maybe it would be quicker for the OP if we just all listed all the five word
names we knew containing the letter "y" ... actually that might be the
solution -
to go to a baby site and post a request for 5 letter names containing the
letter "y" (e.g. www.essentialbaby.com.au choose the 'discussion group'
link - then the 'baby names' group)
 
Hi
also I also have to smile a little bit about this task :-)
one way to get to a feasible solution:
Do you have a list of baby names which can be imported in Excel?. This
is required to do the following:
- import this list in Excel (assumption: column A: name, column B:
male/femal and one heading row),
- filter all male entries (Data - Autofilter) and delete all rows.
After this remove the Autofilter
- Now insert the following in column C (cell C2 as first data row)
=IF(AND(LEN(A2)=5,ISNUMBER(FIND("y",A2))),"Hit","")
copy this down. Now you may filter again all blank rows in column C and
delete the resulting row. Remove the filter and you have your list
 
You can find the top 4275 female first names in the 1990 US census here:

http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/dist.female.first

of those 4275, 664 have one "y", 1857 have exactly 5 letters. 207 have 5
letters with 1 "y".

I used this formula to filter (and filtered on "TRUE"):

=AND((LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2,"Y","")))=1,LEN(A2)=5)



Frank Kabel said:
Hi
also I also have to smile a little bit about this task :-)
one way to get to a feasible solution:
Do you have a list of baby names which can be imported in Excel?. This
is required to do the following:
- import this list in Excel (assumption: column A: name, column B:
male/femal and one heading row),
- filter all male entries (Data - Autofilter) and delete all rows.
After this remove the Autofilter
- Now insert the following in column C (cell C2 as first data row)
=IF(AND(LEN(A2)=5,ISNUMBER(FIND("y",A2))),"Hit","")
copy this down. Now you may filter again all blank rows in column C and
delete the resulting row. Remove the filter and you have your list
Click to expand...
\
 
Wow! That's a lot of responses.

Yes, I realized it would be over 400k names. Most of them would make no
sense whatsoever (Bbbyg, for example) and would easily be deleted leaving us
a manageable list of names. True, this would be very time consuming, but my
wife insists she doesn't mind. She's more afraid that she'll miss one
spelling that she really likes than she is that she'll be wasting a lot of
time sifting through an enormous list.

As to importing a name list and having it search through that list - that
could certainly work and it would cut down on the number of names to sift
through. Perhaps I'll give that a shot first.

I know to some of you this seems like a stupid request which is easily
scoffed at, but I was serious in hoping that I'd receive some help with it.
My wife is taking this very seriously, and I'm trying to be supportive.

Thank you to those trying to help.
 
Back
Top