"Priority" Cells

Does that make sense?

Yes.

I think the answer is no, at least not without some relaxation of your requirements (and maybe not even then). The reason is that a cell would have to have both a formula and a value at the same time which is not supported by Numbers (or any other spreadsheet that I'm aware of).

To understand this, think about how this list would start off initially. What would be in the cells of the priorities? Values? If so, how then could one of these cells change automatically in a response to editing another without that cell containing a formula?

I'll think about this some more. Perhaps I or someone else might have a different approach to what I'm guessing is the need to interactively rank uniquely ten items.

I think your right, 99%. *** written he is talking about ONE column or range of cells. It might be able to be done using two or more columns. Maybe.

I was thinking more along the lines of creating a concatenated value in a second cell whoce background color would change to red if the number beside it was already in the concatenated value.

This would not automatically create the list, but at least indicate that it has been used already.

In excel I wuld use vba and the onchange method of the cells. So that a macro would run everytime you change a cell. So once automation isopened in v2 (hopefully) we will start being able to answer these a little better.

Jason

I think it should work with the expression "Maximum". Start with the first row (e.g. A1)of your priority column with the value 1. The following Row A2 you give:

=MAX(A1:A1)+1

The next cells below:

=MAX(A1:A2)+1
=MAX(A1:A3)+1

and so on. To make it easyer you can add the $ to A1, like A$1, so you can pull down the list and save time. you won't have to type every single formula

Stephan

jaxjason wrote:
I was thinking more along the lines of creating a concatenated value in a second cell whoce background color would change to red if the number beside it was already in the concatenated value.

This might be done with a second column containing COUNTIF()s, colored if the result is larger than 1.

In excel I wuld use vba and the onchange method of the cells. So that a macro would run everytime you change a cell. So once automation isopened in v2 (hopefully) we will start being able to answer these a little better.

I guess in this case there would be no formulas, just the values 1 thru 10 in the cells and the onchange script would manipulate them each time.

If the goal is simply to rank 10 items relative to each other, maybe, though, there is another approach to expressing the relationships. One general idea would simply be some way of arrange the 10 items in a list from highest to lowest. If each item must end up assigned an 1 to 10 priority, that could be computed. The problem is not the ranking, but the way chosen to express the ranking.

you might be surprised how much code is behind something "Simple" like netflix's functionality.

Jason

alephx01 wrote:
... If I change the number in a cell to "2", then whatever cell use to contain "2" becomes the old value of the cell that was just changed.

Is this the way you'd really want this to work? Its seems to me that, for assigning priorities, "bump-down" behavior would be more appropriate (less chaotic) than the exchange behavior:

+bump-down example changing the priority of the first item from 7 to 2+

7 2
8 8
2 3
3 4
4 5
5 6
6 7
0 0
1 1
9 9

This preserves the existing relative order of the unchanged items.

+exchange example changing the priority of the first item from 7 to 2+

7 2
8 8
2 7
3 3
4 4
5 5
6 6
0 0
1 1
9 9

Here the old 2 priority gets shoved rather arbitrarily to priority 7. This doesn't seem usually useful since assigning the first item to 2 doesn't mean the the old 2 is arbitrarily lower. The bump-down method works best when the list is mostly prioritized correctly (which become more and more true as more and more priorities are assigned).

This is not entirely and academic discussion. I'm trying to think of a way to solve the problem, but the exchange behavior is problematic (and perhaps even less desirable).