Daily Dose of Excel

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

Hi all,

Let me start this post with a shameless plug: Charles Williams and I developed Name Manager. From my website alone this tool is good for about 60 downloads a day.

Just a couple of weeks ago, all of a sudden Charles and I started receiving complaints about compile errors, which neither of us could reproduce. Because the version we had available back then used the treeview control from the Windows common controls library, we blamed that control. And indeed, removing the control from the form that housed it fixed the problem for some of our users. But not for all.

Since this kind of errors is extremely hard to troubleshoot, I thought it might be useful to share our experiences.

Luckily we found a user who was willing to help us trouble-shoot the matter. We asked him to do all sorts of things: try on a different client, try logging on as administrator, removing accounts from client, you name it.
After exchanging a host of emails and screenshots and trying all sorts of variations we discovered the culprit: problematic .EXD files in one of the system folders of the client computer (these are just an example, your system may show others too or even none at all):

These files are typically stored in this location:

C:\Documents and Settings\[UserName]\Application Data\Microsoft\Forms\

So far, removing these files from that folder has resolved the issue for the people that experienced trouble with Name Manager.

So, if you distribute an addin to other users and you get a complaint about compile errors in your work: start off by asking the user to weed out the Forms folder I showed above. If it doesn’t help, it certainly wont hurt!

Regards,

Jan Karel Pieterse
www.jkp-ads.com

You know the situation: You have carefully setup a workbook with intricate Validation schemes. But then along comes your user and he copies and pastes at will. Result: Validation zapped, workbook structure violated.

What to do? The only way I find to be reliable is to catch all possible paste operations. But this isn’t very easy, since there are a zilion ways to paste.

I have put together a sample workbook and an explanatory article on how one could go about protecting a workbook by intercepting paste operations.

Let me know what you think!!

Regards,

Jan Karel Pieterse
www.jkp-ads.com

Hi,

A while ago I requested beta testers for a new utility, now called “ExcelRefTool”.

Thanks to my beta testers, the tool is now mature enough to be exposed to the general public.

Have a look here, download the demo if you like and give it a spin.

And thanks again, to everyone who took the trouble of beta testing this tool for me!

Regards,

Jan Karel Pieterse
www.jkp-ads.com

Hi all

I create a small Excel add-in to copy a customized QAT from one workbook to another.
http://www.rondebruin.nl/imageqat.htm#QAT

Because it not use very common code I like to hear from you if you have problems
or if there are there better ways to do it ?

I hope a few of you can test it for me.
You can find a button on the Add-Ins tab to open the userform

Thanks

Hi all

I add a new page to my site with examples to change a button image
of a button in the QAT for all workbooks or for one workbook.
Making a QAT Add-in of the one workbook example seems a good way on
this moment if you want to change the buttons images of your QAT.

http://www.rondebruin.nl/imageqat.htm

Suggestions or comments are welcome
Note: I can’t post comments in this blog but I will read your comments.

Ron de Bruin
http://www.rondebruin.nl/tips.htm