The biggest downside to working in massive corporate offices is the locked down computer systems. There is no internet access, no games, no fun! However, Excel is always installed and kicking. How awesome would it be if Excel had a couple of games in it?
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
Creating user friendly spreadsheets is not just a professional courtesy anymore. We have the obligation to help users decipher the spreadsheet we so hastily put together. Spending a little extra time setting up well designed spreadsheets help a firm reduce future costs by
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.