Daily Dose of Excel

Finally, a legitimate use for Excel

Excel & Music

I get all of them except the “Milkshake” one.

Hi All,

As many of you know I give away a number of tools for Excel through my site www.jkp-ads.com. Today I have updated the two most popular downloads:

Name Manager (which I created together with Charles Williams, www.decisionmodels.com):

Most important change: the unused names filter now includes objects in its search, as well as VBA code. It makes the filter much slower, but way more useful in my opinion. Also, I have added the Greek character set so Name Manager doesn’t (wrongfully) think range names with Greek characters are corrupt.

So far, Name Manager has been downloaded about 50,000 times since I posted it on my site.

Flexfind

I have updated the user interface of Flexfind so (in my opinion) it is easier to use. Also, I have mimicked the find all behaviour of Excel: if you select multiple items in the found items list, Flexfind will create a (multiple) selection of areas of the found cells.

Flexfind is less popular than Name Manager, the download count is at about 23,000.

Enjoy!

Of course I am open to any comments, suggestions and -most importantly- lots of praise

Regards,
Jan Karel Pieterse
www.jkp-ads.com

Worst. BlogPost title. Ever.

Jon Peltier of Peltier Technical Services (and world renowned charting expert) has started the PTS blog to:

…show off some of the projects I’ve worked on, share some Excel and Charting tips and techniques, show how to make some tricky charts that people ask about in forums and newsgroups, and talk about the various utilities I’m working on.

I had already subscribed to the RSS feed for his site, so his first blog post showed up automatically for me. I love RSS. Needless to say, I’ll be reading every post and if you have any interest in charting in Excel, you should too.

MSDN has some nice articles on the basics

The Application Object
The Range Object

Hey, if you’re within 5,000 miles of Sydney, Australia next month, be sure to sign up for the Excel User Conference.

Australian Excel User Conference

I’ll be presenting some of the sessions and I’m pretty excited about that. I’m less excited about spending 18 hours in coach, but at least I’ll finish that book I started two years ago.

I’m going to finish up the outlines for my lectures this weekend, so I’ll post those when they’re done. See you down under!

The blist beta opened this week and I got an invite. I think I signed up for it last November. I really like the things that I can put in fields, such as images, lists, URLs, and even other tables. There are three things that weren’t immediately discoverable by me: I don’t know how to relate two tables; I don’t know how to make a calculated field; I don’t know how to tell them what I think.

Blist launched at Demo ‘08. I watched some of the presentations yesterday. That site must use ActiveX because it wouldn’t work in Firefox. There were a few interesting ones and a lot that solved “problems” that I’ve never had and can hardly conceive.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but xldennis release .Net Co.

With the tool you can:

* Store created VBA code, code snippets / procedures / modules, and SQL Queries in a well organized way enabling you to easily reuse the code in all kind of Excel VBA solutions.
* Create connection strings to a various number of databases with two wizards, the .NET Wizard and the Data Link Wizard. Store the created connections strings in a structural way enabling you to easily reuse the connection strings in all kind of Excel VBA solutions.

.NET Co Library has been designed so it also can be shared within a group of VBA developers over a network.

I don’t use a code library, I just open a previous project and copy what I need. But I’ve often wanted to use one to be more organized about it. I’m going to try this one out and see if I like it.

Last night I downloaded agilegraph. It claims it will turn my spreadsheets into interactive graphs. I’m not much of a charting guy, but I’m interested to see how it works. I had to download .Net 2.0 to install it. I can’t believe I haven’t needed 2.0 for anything yet.