Author: Ejaz

I specialized in actuarial science in my masters’ program and I am determined to become a qualified actuary. I invest extra time and effort into creating intuitive spreadsheet applications that improve productivity at the workplace. I also enjoy spending my leisure time creating digital art; I publish my designs on my art in this blog named Designecdotes. Most of the people who have dramatically influenced my life were enthusiastic academicians. I believe that the greatest gift in life is having a nurturing mentor, and I would like to be that for someone. I owe it to my future mentees to be the best at what I do, and I consciously direct my endeavors at gathering what I consider essential traits of a seasoned mentor.

How to deal with the Numbers Stored As Text Error in Excel?

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How many times have you encountered the “Numbers Stored as text” error in your data sets? It interferes with your LOOKUP and MATCH functions, and arithmetic calculations. Excel has a Convert to Number functionality to help with this situation, but it could be a lot better. You have to deal with your columns one at a time, sometimes one cell at a time. Also, I noticed that if the dataset is huge, excel takes a lot of time to push through; occasionally, it is so slow that you can see the cells getting updated one by one.

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Magically Select All The Used Areas In A Sheet using VBA

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I recently published a post about automatically formatting a table in Excel using VBA. That got me thinking, how awesome it would be, if we could format all the tables in a sheet, with a single click. For that idea to work, we need to get all the used areas in a worksheet; and then use the Areas Collection to loop through the tables. We can access the Areas Collection through the Areas property of the Range object.

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Magically Format Tables in Excel using VBA

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Excel Tables make analyzing data, a breeze. It surprises me that it is not used as often as it should. It automatically “includes” new data you add to your spreadsheets, it automatically drags down formulas for you, it automatically formats the tables for you. In addition to that, you can use structured references that make your formulas tractable without having to name each range. You can also link an Excel Table to your PowerPivot Model. For a comprehensive, yet concise list of stuff excel tables can do, I recommend reading through this page.

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Prepare for the show: A framework for hiding rows and columns in your spreadsheet applications

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Prepare for the Show

Hiding a bunch of rows and columns in a sheet before showing it to your boss is inevitable.  I insert blank rows and columns around a table, so I can use the CurrentRegion property of the Range Object in my code. I add labels to all my named ranges in the sheet. I split out complex formulas into a couple of columns. Ultimately I end up with a lot of rows and columns to hide.  I desperately needed a framework to hide and un-hide rows and columns in all my sheets. I experimented with a lot of methods before settling down with one and I would definitely like to know if you have a better way to do it.

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To Err is Excel, Handle your Errors with grace

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Error handling is an important aspect of programming in VBA, especially if you are writing macros for other users. Unfortunately, many users ignore it completely. Visual Basics is an amazing programming language, but it lags far behind in the error handling department. All we have is the “On Error”, “Goto” and the “Resume” statements. These statements allow only a few error handling structures, and each of the structures has its own set of expert proponents. In this post, I am going to share with you, a little block of code that I use to handle errors in all my spreadsheet applications; and hopefully offer a fresh perspective.

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Progress Bar for all your excel Applications

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Progress Bar

Excel is versatile by itself and VBA makes it even better by allowing us to do our own thing. Most of us use VBA to automate tasks of varying complexity – some macros are executed in a flash, but others take hours to run. While there are users who are happy with just a Msgbox “This thing is DONE!”, there are others who’d like to let the user know more about what is happening.

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Mix And Match – Get all possible permutations of an unlimited number of lists in Excel

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Mix N Match

This post is a little fun, not much of a Struggle I guess. In excel, we use permutations more often than we realize. Say you have twenty performance metrics and you’d like to monitor them for each month, imagine how much copy pasting and concatenating would need being done to get your column header names in place?

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