Question

I have a bunch of rows in a Google Spreadsheet that look as such:

a,b,c,d
a,d
c,d
b,d,f
a,b,f,g,h,i
q,b,b

…And on.

I need a way to create a unique list of related pairs in this format:

a,b
a,c
a,d
b,c
b,d
c,d
b,f
d,f
a,f
a,g
a,h
a,i

…And on.

Any idea how I’d do that? I’m open to answers using Google Spreadsheet’s scripting language, Excel 2004’s scripting language or something else like PHP.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Not sure if this satisfies your platform requirements, but here is a spreadsheet formula that can be used in Google Spreadsheets itself (not in any Excel version though):

=ArrayFormula(SORT(TRANSPOSE(SPLIT(CONCATENATE(REPT(UNIQUE(TRANSPOSE(SPLIT(JOIN(",";A:A);",")))&","&TRANSPOSE(UNIQUE(TRANSPOSE(SPLIT(JOIN(",";A:A);","))));(UNIQUE(TRANSPOSE(SPLIT(JOIN(",";A:A);",")))<=TRANSPOSE(UNIQUE(TRANSPOSE(SPLIT(JOIN(",";A:A);",")))))*REGEXMATCH(CONCATENATE(","&SUBSTITUTE(A:A;",";",,")&","&CHAR(9));"(,"&UNIQUE(TRANSPOSE(SPLIT(JOIN(",";A:A);",")))&",[^\t]*,"&TRANSPOSE(UNIQUE(TRANSPOSE(SPLIT(JOIN(",";A:A);","))))&",)|(,"&TRANSPOSE(UNIQUE(TRANSPOSE(SPLIT(JOIN(",";A:A);","))))&",[^\t]*,"&UNIQUE(TRANSPOSE(SPLIT(JOIN(",";A:A);",")))&",)"))&CHAR(9));CHAR(9)))))

It also assumes you don’t want to list “b,a” as well as “a,b”.

EDIT: These sort of formulae can be horribly inefficient for very large data sets, so consider only using if processing a few hundred rows or less.