Bingo anyone? How to cross check a list of numbers & letters

[JohnnyBravo]

Past few weeks, I've been watching National Bingo night on ABC and basically how the show works is that you go on their website to print out bingo cards and mark off the numbers as they are called during the show. (We all know how it works eh?) When you visit their website and click on the link for "print cards"... they've got it rigged so that it automatically brings up the Print menu dialogue and it doesn't give you any choice at all to save it in a txt format. Anyways, I've got a special software that will allow me to give a final output of all 3 sheets in a PDF format. So luckily I was able to save all the bingo cards onto my hard drive.

Within Acrobat Reader....here's what the bingo cards look like. There's a sheet for Red; White; & Blue.

http://aycu11.webshots.com/image/19770/2001705016370705018_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2001705016370705018)

I select the text like so:

http://aycu35.webshots.com/image/17354/2001787367705825244_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2001787367705825244)

Then paste it into Excel.

http://aycu28.webshots.com/image/20187/2000402741451484687_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2000402741451484687)

I used the text to columns feature to separate each number into it's own cell like this:
http://aycu35.webshots.com/image/20794/2000400237212191028_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2000400237212191028)

Now the question is how do I cross check it against a text file? I've got all the numbers that were called off during Friday nights show saved as a text file. B5, I8, N44, G59, O71....etc. I think I saw some sort of VBA code in the knowledge base ....something to do with coloring cells based on validation?? I printed off more than 300 bingo sheets so it's going to be extremely tedious to do this by hand. I thought Excel would be the best application to use as it deals with letters & numbers.

Anyways, as you can see this isn't anything serious... just something I'm doing for fun. Any help would be appreciated. :)

[rbrhodes]

Hi JB,

Perhaps an example of the text file?

Cheers,
dr

[GreenTree]

How much is a winning card worth? :sneaky:

I'd do it as a second grid with a VLookup over to the list of all numbers, where 1 thru whatever is in one column, and next to each one is a 1 or 0 showing if that # was in your text file (which is the part the VBA code would need to generate). Then conditional format to make the 1's stand out in your grid.

And, for added measure, you can have a cell that sums each row, col, and diagonal; a sum of 5 means you have a winner.

Have fun!

[mdmackillop]

I don't see why you need the A1 reference, you can simply locate and colour a cell using Find