It's been a while since this was first posted but I thought I'd share my opinion anyway.
Not sure how easy would be to achieve this with Excel but I have some ideas that may help. Most lottery related Excel sheets I came across would have the lottery results in a number of columns equal to the total numbers drawn. The problem with such layout is that, in order to achieve what you want, it may complicate things due to the complexity of the formulas needed.
Let's say you want to do your forecasting for a 5/45 system. If you have your drawn numbers in five columns, the rows in your Excel sheet will look similar to the following:
12 | 15 | 19 | 26 | 31 |
4 | 5 | 9 | 12 | 22 |
5 | 8 | 12 | 15 | 19 |
Notice how number 12 is in the first column of the first row but, in the second row is in column four while in the third row, the same number 12 is in the third column. What this means is that, for each number in every row, you will have to iterate trough all other rows and, inside each row iteration, you'll have to iterate trough all five columns to see if there are any matches.
With a large set of lottery numbers, this may take some computing power, especially if you will want to do some additional calculations. I'm thinking about how many times a number is paired with another...
So, maybe a 45 column layout would be a better idea. 45 columns which would hold any drawn number from 1 to 45, or cell left empty for the not drawn numbers. In this case, for the first set of numbers (the ones in the first row in the above table) you'd have empty cells from A to J, then column K would contain number 12. Columns M and N empty, and 15 would be in column O. And so on and so forth... Hope this makes sense...
Such layout (as many cols as numbers in the pool) would probably be a better optimized solution for your task because in this way you would have to iterate, for each number, trough its own column only, and not worry about the other columns. At least to find the number frequency and the "hot", "cold" and "overdue" numbers.
The hot numbers would simply be those that have been drawn the most (is present in most cells in the column that holds that particular number) during a given period which you can define yourself (e.g. from row nr. X to row nr. Y)
And in a similar way, the cold numbers would be those drawn the least during a given period.
The most overdue numbers would be those that have the most empty cells above or under them, depending how you'll be sorting/inserting the numbers in your spreadsheet, top/bottom or bottom/top.
For the number pairs, things are a little more complicated because you'll most likely need to iterate -- for each of the 45 numbers -- trough each row and find out what are the other numbers that came out with the number you're looking at. And if you're looking for more than simple, two number pairs, it may be really difficult. But I am not really an Excel expert so don't know if Excel has any built in functions that could help you with that.
Now, back to what you are trying to achieve, as explained in the initial post...
I have been working on a web-based lottery prediction system for more than five years now (full time) and I can say that, to get, even a tiny-TINY bit, closer to the winning results of any lottery, you will need a whole lot more than those three points (a, b and c)
So, assuming the goal is to somehow narrow down the possible outcome, based on my experience I can say that:
1. Point a) is not going to help at all
2. Point b) may be somewhat useful in further, more complex tasks (e.g. wheeling trough all possible combinations and only considering some that meet certain criteria)
3. Point c) is again, not useful
If anyone is interested, I can explain the above 3 statements in detail.
but is a picture and it is incomplete
