I don't use Excel much, mostly because I have no real need for spreadsheets at the moment. I will later, since I'll have to start doing some accounting work next summer. But for now, it just sits there on my hard drive and only gets used when I feel like playing with some charts (I love charts).

Anyway, I got one of those $2 "Bingo" lottery tickets today. Basically, it gives you a list of numbers, plus a collection of "Bingo Cards" and you have to match the numbers to fill a line. If you've played "Bingo" (and who hasn't?), then you know what I'm talking about. The card came with 30 numbers, 5 "Bingo" cards each with 25 numbers on them (for a total of 125 numbers on the entire thing). It seemed like a pretty daunting task to search through 125 spaces, looking for a match to each of the given numbers.

I spent almost 20 minutes on it, only to find that the little "rub to activate" feature didn't work so well. That's how I was supposed to show the matches. When one of the spaces was rubbed, it would turn blue. Well, it sounds good in theory, but it doesn't actually work that well. It was hard to see if I had actually filled in some of the spaces and I was afraid I would miss a completed line. So, I fired up Excel to do the work for me.

You can see the result of my (pointless) adventure on the left. I didn't win anything, which kind of made me feel as though I wasted my time. Which I did, actually.

Interested in how it works? Too bad, because I'm going to tell you anyway. The possible numbers are on the left. The "Bingo" cards are on the right. I used the "Duplicates" Conditional Formatting option to highlight the matches in each card. Each card got its own Conditional Formatting rule, otherwise they would have shown matches between each other, which I didn't want. I originally wanted to use the "Equal to" option, but I couldn't find a way to make it compare two cell ranges. Duplicates works just fine, though.

So, that was a pointless post, wasn't it? I honestly don't know why I took the time to write it. I guess I thought someone might think it was a good idea and go off to spend 20 minutes working on a $2 "Bingo" lottery ticket. Well, believe me, it's not worth it.