Finding number of possible word combinations I have three columns with many words. How do I calculate the number of possible combinations?
It gets complicated because, for example:
Column 1       | Column 2     | Column 3

Mini           | Big          | Large

Any            | Word         | Here

....so combinations could be: 
mini, big, large....
mini, big, here...
mini, word, large...
mini, word, here...
any, big, large...
any, word, large....
any, big, here....
any, word, here...
I hope that makes sense.
I've seen $C(n,r)$ but not sure exactly how to work that and how to use that with three sets.
 A: If your combinations are one of each column, you just multiply the number of elements in the three columns.  If you have $a,b,c$ items in each column, you have $a$ choices for the first element, $b$ for the second, $c$ for the third, and $abc$ for the combination.
A: If each of the three columns might have a number between $1$ and $1000$ inclusive, then the number of possible combinations would be $1000 \times 1000 \times 1000 = 1,000,000,000$.
Likewise, as stated in Ross's answer, if you know the number of numbers in each column, multiply these numbers of numbers together to achieve your result.
This holds for combinations of words as well as numbers; one just multiplies the number of words in each column (call the columns $A$, $B$, and $C$) to obtain the number of possible combinations:
$words_A \times words_B \times words_C$
A: I believe the function C(n,r) is a function that returns the total number of ways you can group n items in to groups of size r. From my understanding of the question that you have asked this is not what you need. You simply need to multiply the number of items in each column together (as previously answered).
