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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.