Comments on: Creating Wildcards

By: John R

John R — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 19:48:00 +0000

I cannot fix the phantom workbooks in VBE by clearing the addins in Registry. The problem I have is the books I am trying to close has a reference to the one which calls the closing routine and should shut itself down at the end. However it will not as there is still a reference to it in another workbook albeit a phantom one. Crashes Excel if I close. I have taken all the code out of the phantom books and it still happens also removed the reference. Seems to happed whatever. They are all based on a template so all have the same VB project name, changing this once opened makes no difference. Can anyone give me any more ideas. May be chuck Excel 2007!

By: brettdj

brettdj — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 04:00:00 +0000

Rob,

I recently fixed my VBE phantom workbook issue by culling the Addins from the registry.

Cheers

Dave

By: fzz

fzz — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 23:55:00 +0000

Okk: In terms of inferring a pattern, there’s a big difference between {“QC123pg123?,”QC123lp123?} and {“file123A2name”,”file9A4name”}. The first requires QC123*p*123 while the latter could be rendered as file?*A?name, where * and ?* take on their COUNTIF/SUMIF meanings: * means ZERO or more characters while ?* means ONE or more characters. Much easier to program detection of one or more characters. That said, there comes a point where only humans could detect patterns.

By: the Okk

the Okk — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 05:36:00 +0000

fzz: I’m talking about situations like {file123A2name,file9A4name}. Where “A” is an important and separates {file123A2name,file9A4name} from {file123B2name,file9B4name}.
Of course QC123??123 will be more efficient for computer… but I think that that mask isn’t complete.

By: fzz

fzz — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 18:38:00 +0000

QC123*p*123 may look better to humans, but QC123??123 would be much more efficient for computers to process. See any text on regular expressions. So it depends on who or what would be the intended user of these patterns.

Any soundex or approximate matching algorithm could be adapted for this. They could restrict pattern generation to the two strings with the poorest match, and they could be canibalized to locate common substrings.

Note that generating a pattern for pairs is much easier than generating patterns for 3 or more strings. For example, {abc,bca} -> ?bc?, but {abc,bca,cab} -> *a*, *b*, *c* all equally applicable and inefficient. And if there are no substrings in common, e.g., {abc,defg,hijkl}, what should the return pattern be, just * or ???* ? The latter indicates at least 3 characters. Again a question of whether the generated patterns are intended for human readers or computer processes. If the former, * may be better, but ???* would be much more useful in the latter case.

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:37:00 +0000

Matt -

Having just researched this, the tags are:

[ v b ] and [ / v b ]

all closed together. See the "code in comments" thread.

...Michael

By: the Okk

the Okk — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 08:21:00 +0000

Dick Kusleika: Are you sure? Is QC123*p*123 mask is not better?

By: Dick Kusleika

Dick Kusleika — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 03:59:00 +0000

?wildcards("QC123pg123","QC123lp123")
QC123*

should return

QC123??123

I like the concept though. I'll try to tweak it.

By: Rob van Gelder

Rob van Gelder — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 01:07:00 +0000

Keith: I tried to reproduce the problem using the steps you provided. It didn't reproduce the problem for me.

I'm positive that the COM add-in we use was causing the problem.

The non registry way to solve is as follows:
You need to get the "COM Add-Ins..." button onto your commandbar.
- right click the commandbar, select Customize...
- click the commands tab. From categories, choose Tools. From Commands, choose COM Add-Ins.
- drag COM Add-Ins button to your commandbar. Close the Customize windows. Click the COM Add-Ins button.

-or-

To open COM Add-Ins window directly, execute this VBA:
Application.CommandBars.FindControl(Id:=3754).Execute

Then manage your Add-Ins by either unticking them, or removing them.

Rob

By: Keith Johnson

Keith Johnson — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 23:34:00 +0000

Rob et al:

Off topic, but on the "Closed Workbooks in Projects window" issue. An attempt or two to resolve this (in March 2006) concluded that "Phantom Workbooks" were created by other than a misbehaving addin. For example, if I remember correctly, I could reliably create one by programmatically opening a workbook (Set Wkb = Workbooks.Open(Path)), executing a dummy routine in it (via Application.Run), closing the workbook (Call Wkb.Close) and releasing its object variable (Set Wkb = Nothing). The workbook then remained as a phantom.

They're mostly annoying. Associated objects like ThisWorkbook can't be selected in the VBE. The "out of memory" messages are, at least, innocuous. What I most objected to was that, although you *could* exceute code in phantom modules, attempting to *remove* them crashed Excel

I'm relatively convinced that Application.Run is creating a reference within Excel that is not cleared, and I couldn't then and can't now see how to clear it. There likely are other ways to do the same thing. But eventually, we gave up. Restarting Excel clears things up, and that had to be a good enough "solution." (Googling "phantom workbook" in the MS excel programming newsgroup should lead anyone to this interchange.)

Keith