Removing non-printing characters from text in Excel using VBA

August 16, 2018Posted inUser Defined Function
Removing non-printing characters from text in Excel using VBA

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.

Fit Worksheet to Window in Excel

October 21, 2017Posted inMacros, Tips and Tricks4 Comments
Fit Worksheet to Window in Excel

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

June 17, 2017Posted inMacros2 Comments
Duplicate a Sheet and retain a reference to it in Excel VBA

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.

When do I use the Sheets Collection in Excel VBA?

September 9, 2015Posted inTips and Tricks5 Comments
When do I use the Sheets Collection in Excel VBA?

There are two collections in Excel-VBA that lets the user access sheets in a workbook: the Sheets collection and the Worksheets collection. You can use these collections interchangeably in most situations, but they were each created for a specific purpose. Read on if you’d like to know more about why Microsoft created those two collections and their purpose.