OK so inspired by a post I saw on HN about 'FIZZBUZZ' a day or so ago I was inspired to send out a challenge to my department. I thought i'd share with HN to see if anyone can do anything impressive with it.

My Challenge was as follows:

OK, so everyone uses Excel right, but how good are you with your formulae?

The challenge is to write a formula that references the cell to the left, which should have a number in it. If the number is divisible by 3 then the cell with your formula in it should show ‘FIZZ’, if the number is divisible by 5 then your cell should show ‘BUZZ’, if the number is divisible by both 3 and 5 it should show ‘FIZZBUZZ’. If it’s divisible by neither 3 nor 5 then the cell should show the number in the referenced cell.

The Actual Challenge!

So some of you may find the above hard, some of you may find it easy. To separate the men (and ladies) from the boys (and girls), the challenge is to write the formula using the least number of characters possible!

So, for example, if the challenge was to add the number 1 to itself, then the formula =1+1 would beat =SUM(1,1) because the first only uses 4 characters to do the job, the second does exactly the same task but uses 9 characters in the formula.

The person that come up with a working formula to perform the ‘FIZZBUZZ’ action described above, using the least number of characters, wins!

Note: No scripting or anything other than native Excel functions allowed! It needs to just be a formula that can be copied and pasted on to any sheet.

Go!