If you’d like to loop through all the cells in a sheet, it is very tempting to use something like the following:
Sub LoopThroughCells() Dim rngCell As Range For Each rngCell In Excel.ActiveSheet.Cells 'Type your code here Next rngCell End Sub
In one of my previous posts, I wrote a function to concatenate the values stored in all the cells of a specified range. That function holds good, if you have a text stored in all the cells, and you just want to club them together. It fails if you have cells containing numeric values: dates, percentages, currencies or time. In another post, I wrote a function that returns a formatted string of the value stored in a cell, by automatically fetching the cell’s Number Format.
Many of us are familiar with the Text() function. It comes in handy when you set up excel to draft reports for you. It converts a numeric value stored in a cell to a string based on the format specified by the user. The only thing I hate about that function is that you have to specify the format every time you use it. Another drawback is, the format of the text is not linked to the cell formatting of the cell that is being referred to. For instance, if you later decide to change the cell formatting of a cell, you also have to change the Special-Format-String argument in the Text() function.
Excel uses a three stage process to recalculate cells. It first draws a dependency tree, and then lists a calculation chain and then recalculates the cells. Check this link if you are interested in learning more about the recalculation process. Excel determines if a cell’s value depends on another, and decides the order in which they should be recalculated.
Visual Basics for Applications (VBA) allows users to build on the existing functionality of Microsoft Excel. It comes with a strong set of inbuilt functions that are often not readily accessible from Excel’s interface. These functions have to be wrapped inside a user defined function to be usable in Excel. A classic example is the Split function.
Most of us have used the Concatenate() function in Excel. It is a neat function that saves you the trouble of keying in “&” between the range addresses. The only thing that would make this awesome would be the ability to concatenate an entire range. That would be way more useful than having to comma separate each cell that you want to concatenate.