Macros Archives - Struggling To Excel

Remove Filters in an Excel Sheet using VBA

By Ejaz February 7, 2019Macros

Has your data import procedure ever failed due to users applying filters to the data? This happens quite often, especially when you have to distribute multiple files, which you intend to stack later. Copying filtered data copies only works on the visible cells; and you end up loosing out the hidden rows if the user applied a filter before saving the file. Let us take a look at how to remove filters from an Excel sheet from VBA, so you can copy the whole dataset.

Fit Worksheet to Window in Excel

By Ejaz October 21, 2017Macros, Tips and Tricks4 Comments

Have you ever felt Excel needed a Fit-Document-to-Window-Width feature like the millions of PDF Readers out there? Wouldn’t it be great if you could automatically fit your document to your current window size? The irony is, Excel already has all it needs to deliver that feature to you. Since spreadsheets come in various shapes and sizes, you might want to fit the width, or height, or the entire sheet to your screen. In this post, we will take a look at a routine that I wrote that you can use to fit any sheet to your window. And for you lazy bunch, I have an add-in that will let you call these macros from the Excel Ribbon.

Duplicate a Sheet and retain a reference to it in Excel VBA

By Ejaz June 17, 2017Macros2 Comments

I recently worked on a project where my client had a Master template-sheet that needed to be duplicated and populated repeatedly. I needed to duplicate a sheet, and retain a reference to it, so I can rename it, reposition it, and pass it to another sub that populates it with data. I assumed there must be a very straight forward way to that, but was utterly disappointed when I found out there wasn’t.

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

By Ejaz August 11, 2014Macros, Tips and Tricks22 Comments

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.

Magically Select All The Used Areas In A Sheet using VBA

By Ejaz June 15, 2014Macros14 Comments

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.

Magically Format Tables in Excel using VBA

By Ejaz June 2, 2014Macros5 Comments

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.

Get the Actual Used Range in a Spreadsheet

By Ejaz May 26, 2014Macros32 Comments

In one of my posts, I wrote about the UsedRange property of the Worksheet object. I use it in almost all of my spreadsheet applications. Excel keeps track of the last cell you used during your current session, and uses it to determine the used range of a sheet. The last cell is the one you get to, when you press Ctrl+End.

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

By Ejaz April 25, 2014Macros, Tips and Tricks8 Comments

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.

To Err is Excel, Handle your Errors with grace

By Ejaz April 15, 2014Macros10 Comments

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.

Progress Bar for all your excel Applications

By Ejaz March 27, 2014Applications, Macros74 Comments

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.