Comments for Daily Dose of Excel

Comment on Excel Links by Alderaic

Alderaic — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:48:02 +0000

definitely would not… not even a fake testimonial

Comment on To Disable or Not To Disable, That Is the Question by Ross Mclean

Ross Mclean — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:07:58 +0000

Lets split the atom:

Disable, not hide,
Error messahe when you click a disable option telling you what to do?

Do i win Dick? lol!

In a lot of the new .Net/SQL 05/08 there is loads of error handing stuff that ponits to help files and web sites etc. 2 things to note about this, pointing to help on a web site that is not there is WORSE that totally f@#king useless, if you put URL in you code make sure they are going to work for the next ten years, or I will shoot you, you idiot. Next thing, if you going to write help file, for goodness sack make them usefull and actually helpfull, I can count of the fingers of one hand the number of times MS help file have helped me. Why can a chap working at his day job, and writing somthing up quickly be soooooo much better at write help topics that some MS gimp boy who does it for a full time job?

and another thing…..

Comment on Excel Links by Ross Mclean

Ross Mclean — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:51:11 +0000

YEah thats what I thought Jon, but I cant see anyone really using her/them, can you?

Comment on Identify Empty Cells in VBA by MacroMan

MacroMan — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:24:33 +0000

Simon,

Whoa, how in the world did you know that!? Yes it is, the no “()” in the variant Dim statement confused me. I read your blogs, but I haven’t been playing around with VBA code in a while.

Comment on To Disable or Not To Disable, That Is the Question by Simon Murphy

Simon Murphy — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:28:23 +0000

I’m with Rob.
In menus etc I really don’t like hiding stuff, disable would be me preference. For forms sometime I might hide a child section till required.

I tend to work by position so I know roughly where I expect to find stuff and scan from there till I find it. I can only assume whoever came up with personalised menus (and the Ribbon) works completely differently.

I’d get quickly annoyed if I was offered a bunch of identical looking commands and half of them just fired a message box saying they weren’t allowed, wasting me 2 clicks to learn what greyed shows with zero.

Comment on To Disable or Not To Disable, That Is the Question by Hans Schraven

Hans Schraven — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:13:24 +0000

Preferably I consider workboooks and documents as data storage facilities. The most important VBA instruction I use is Application.visible =false. Communication with the user is being handled with a userform.
Essential prerequisite is a thorough analysis of the tasks the computer has to perform and which instructions (and in what order) the user has to give to the computer. I try to let the computer work ‘for’ the user instead of letting the user work ‘with’ the computer.
If in some cases user-involvement in unavoidable (for instance when assessing the result of the computer’s work: products in Word) I usually disable all commandbars and design a special commandbar fitted for the task that is being performed. If users ‘complain’ I consider that as feedback on where I missed something in the analysis of the task the computer has to perform.

Comment on Identify Empty Cells in VBA by Simon Murphy

Simon Murphy — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:11:34 +0000

MacroMan
Wilmott by any chance??

Comment on Referring to Previous Sheet by Phil

Phil — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:54:19 +0000

Ive tried to use that formulas but ive got an error (formula has an error - indirect is highlighted) when Im trying to insert name ThisSheet =GET.CELL(32+0*now(),indirect(”rc”,False))

Do you know why this is happening?

Comment on Excel Links by John Walkenbach

John Walkenbach — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:57:47 +0000

What a world we live in. An anonymous person with no credentials or samples can advertise their services on the Web and collect money in advance. And, if I understand the Service Terms, she can provide absolutely lousy service, and the client has no recourse.

Nice gig, Rainman!

Comment on Running Macros When a Workbook is Opened by Ronald Dodge

Ronald Dodge — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:13:24 +0000

I also have ran into an issue with Workbook_Open not working properly when opening up the workbook with a such code. Generally it works fine, but there has been cases when the “EnableEvents” has been set to false for some strange reason (and no, this was not via code as I rarely ever use the property in code, though if debugging or it errored out and didn’t get past such code to re-enable the events by setting this property back to true, then this would be one such case where it would cause the Open Event on the Workbook object to NOT work).

As a result of this event not working properly in those unknown cases, I almost always use the “Private Sub Auto_Open()” within a standard module. If we still need to have a such macro to work after opening up the workbook via code, I could then use the “Application.Run” method to run such code. Of course, the Auto_Open procedure would only call on another procedure that is set to “Public”, so as the Application.Run method can see the procedure that it needs to run, given the “Auto_Open” procedure is set to Private as that is the only way I been able to get it to work properly.

Comment on To Disable or Not To Disable, That Is the Question by Charles Williams

Charles Williams — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:06:49 +0000

I mostly go with disable rather than hide on a form, but also use Messages for command sequence problems when the user has to have done something first ie “Please get history data before doing forecast”. I guess I dont have hard and fast rules: it all depends on context.

Comment on Running Macros When a Workbook is Opened by Nick

Nick — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:52:13 +0000

If you use events heavily in alot of workbooks, then it might be useful to have an Auto_Open to run the Workbook_Open actions if events have been disabled (perhaps from an uncaught error in a segment of code which had disabled events).

Comment on Number Stored as Text by Alec

Alec — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:44:53 +0000

We have a database program that you can query out certain barcodes.
1. highlight all barcodes
2. copy the numbers
3. go to excel
4. ‘right click’
5. ‘paste special’
6. ‘text’

It automatically formatted them as numbers. Before, it was copying over as html.

Comment on Excel Links by Tushar Mehta

Tushar Mehta — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:06:57 +0000

Dick wrote: By the way, my “to read” list is a list of things I want to do but probably never will.

You should add the following to your list:
Using VBA to access the ’Net
http://www.tushar-mehta.com/publish_train/xl_vba_cases/vba_web_pages_services/index.htm

Comment on Identify Empty Cells in VBA by Kronemab

Kronemab — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:11:09 +0000

I’m running into a similar issue w/empty cells, in that I’m trying to copy one column of data from one sheet to another.

However, the column in the first sheet may or may not have blank cells (identified by “”), depending on parameters set by user - and what I’d like to do is set up code that always pastes the actual data in consecutive rows.

Example:

First Sheet

A
1 12344
2 “”
3 “”
4 4525
5 4565
6 “”

Second Sheet (desired output)

A
1 12344
2 4525
3 4565

Any ideas?

Comment on To Disable or Not To Disable, That Is the Question by Doug Glancy

Doug Glancy — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:45:14 +0000

I mostly agree, but I think there are gray areas. For example, one of my addins allows you to save a workbook in a certain format. It doesn’t work if the workbook hasn’t been saved yet, i.e., it’s still “Book1″. I don’t disable the item in that situation though, because I think it would be more confusing to the user. Instead if they click it there’s a “This workbook must be saved first” message. I don’t know how else I’d explain it as effectively beforehand. Of course, I should really offer the chance to save the workbook right then and continue, so, bad example…

Maybe a better one is if you try to print a blank worksheet. You get the “nothing to print” message. I think that’s better than greying it out, which could be more confusing. I’d also argue the same for the message you get if you try to sort or filter in an empty area. Except the message you get is not much help either…

Comment on To Disable or Not To Disable, That Is the Question by zach

zach — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:33:31 +0000

It appears there’s pretty much unanimous disagreement with that statement. I have some quick-and-dirty macros that graduated to my add-in menu for which I never bothered with enabling/disabling. Even though I wrote the code and have used it for years, I still manage to occasionally trigger it in an inappropriate setting and screw things up. I don’t see a message box telling me I shouldn’t have done that being any more useful than the VB error box.

This whole discussion reminds me of my favorite windows application ever, the appropriately named Windows Enabler. It allows you to totally disregard the programmer’s intentions and re-enable those disabled controls to see what happens.

http://www.angelfire.com/falcon/speedload/Enabler.htm

Comment on To Disable or Not To Disable, That Is the Question by Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:13:33 +0000

I was surprised by Joel’s statement.

Comment on Simple Gantt Chart by Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:12:13 +0000

The point is, you have to add images to charts carefully, if at all. Most examples I’ve seen shout out “Forget the data! Look how clever and artistic I am!” The unfortunate reader has to play a game of “I Spy” or “Where’s Waldo” with the data.

Comment on To Disable or Not To Disable, That Is the Question by Jim Rech

Jim Rech — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:05:31 +0000

Amen to what Rob said.