Hello,

This seems simple to me, but is so far baffling me on a way to
accomplish it without spending hours manually writing formulas.

So here's the problem. I essentially have a very large sheet of hard
numbers. They are presented in a table format but are read diagonally,
so that the cell to the top right is the next instance of an occurence.

Here is an example of what I am dealing with:
__A_____B_______C_______D__
1|| 7    11    8    7
2|| 11    10    6    6
3|| 11    7    1    6
4|| 6    0    3    3
5|| 3    1    0    1
6|| 2    0    0    5
7|| 0    0    2    5

Look at D3, C4, B5, and A6. What I need to do is - if D3 is greater
than C4, then add the difference of two to C4. The trick though is that
I need the result of that new calculation (in this case, ((6-3)+3)=6
has to be the new variable for the calculation between C4 and B5. So
rather than excel saying that B5 is 1 and C4 is 3, I need it to
recognize that B5 is 1 and C4 is now 6, and thus turn B5 into 6 as
well.

Essentially I need excel to turn all diagonal rows of data into their
highest entity, but still allowing for reductions to remain (if A6 were
7 for instance, nothing would happy as 7 is greater than 6).

You would think a simple =if(d3>c4,((d3-c4)+c4),c4) would work, but
excel will only work with the original data and not the result. Is
there any way to force what i want to happen?