I believe I owe you an explanation; about this post’s title. At first, you might think I am a pompous prick, branding my work myself as First Class. This Progress Bar was my first project after I learned how to set up class modules: hence the name. The progress bar that I developed earlier, is one of my most visited posts, and I thought I have to reward my readers with a progress bar that is much easier to use.
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.
I always use locally named range in all my spreadsheets, in fact I wrote a post about it earlier. I extend my love for named ranges even while writing VBA code for spreadsheet applications. Using a pure Offset function based code, or a Cell Reference based code, in my opinion, is not the best way to go. Having named ranges in worksheets, and updating them to include more data before processing is the best way to go.
Many small-scale businesses do not use database management systems to generate reports. Most of them stick to spreadsheet packages. Unfortunately Spreadsheet softwares are not equipped with advanced query and report generating features. However, some Excel users struggle with Reports that they update, save and print manually. It is a very tedious job, but VBA can make it better. I have created a spreadsheet application you may used to fill a template/report with different “Records“, save each in a separate workbook, and print automatically.
My previous Excel Navigation add-in fetched a few fans; I got a lot of positive feedback on LinkedIn. I designed it to help people working on enormous spreadsheets. I then realized that big workbooks usually host many sheets. I received a few requests to add worksheet selection functionality into the form. Nothing makes me happier than to help my fellow strugglers, so I worked on an extension.
Have you ever been frustrated about having to scroll through endless rows and columns in an Excel Spreadsheet? I have! With all the amazing touch screen devices flooding the market, having to use the scroll bar seems a bit archaic. I longed for a better solution and transformed that yearning into a fun little project. I drew inspiration from the navigator panes in graphics design suits and strategy games.
Some of the tasks I had to do at work involved running a couple of “master” spreadsheet models every month for new market conditions, for a lot of clients. Running the models took ages, but the part I loathed the most was, I had to rename each workbook individually. I figured, my time is far too valuable and created an Excel Spreadsheet Application to rename the files for me.