Have you ever encountered a perfectly constructed MATCH or a VLOOKUP function failing for no apparent reason? Have you had VBA tell you that a file does not exist even though it does? You may have non-printing characters to blame. There are notorious space-like characters that are invisible to the naked eye, which sneak in when you are importing data from Web Pages, Word Documents or PDFs. In this post we will learn more about these characters and how to remove them from your data.
Excel’s Application object’s WorksheetFunction property is a container for Microsoft Excel worksheet function. This property returns a WorksheetFunction object that allows VBA access to the rich set of functions that are built into Excel. While VBA has some generic functions of its own, Excel’s set is much bigger, and more suited for (you guessed it) Excel. As soon as you type in the dot after WorksheetFunction, you will see a list of Excel functions that you can use in your VBA code. But do you really need the WorksheetFunction object?
A fellow struggler requested me to help him with a slightly beefed up Range Concatenate function. He needed to combine a bunch of numbers in a range; there were multiple entries of the same number, and he wanted a unique list; finally he needed to format the numbers.
I am a big fan of using named ranges in my VBA code. It makes referring to cells in formulas easy, and I can also helps in auditing the code. For instance, I can simply search for “RangeName” (including the quotes) to see if that particular range name is being used in my code.
Regular-Expressions (RegExp) is something I bumped into when my string manipulation requirements jumped to an advanced level. Before I started using this powerhouse, all my string manipulation functions involved maneuvering through a dozen for-loops; and tackling hundreds of Left-Right-Mid-InStr functions. RegExp is a pattern matching system that allows you to perform advanced string manipulations very easily. It may take a while to get used to it, but once you get the hang of it, the possibilities are endless.
In my many years of rummaging through the internet for help, I have seen countless posts where troubled help seekers are told that VBA does not have a built in function to reverse a string. Amature know-alls suggest a makeshift solution using a for-loop; and everyone is happy. Contrary to popular belief, Visual Basics does have a built in function to reverse a string: StrReverse()
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.