August 2008 - Daily Dose of Excel

Twittering Away the Day

The twitter experiment is now over. I used Tweetake to get my tweets into a CSV, which I then opened in Excel. I tried to post every 1/2 hour. At the time of the post, I’d write what I did since the last post. Since I usually did more than one thing, I [...] Read More...

Published Fri, Aug 29 2008 9:21 PM by Daily Dose of Excel

Filed under: Pivot Tables

User Initials in Excel

In Excel, you can get the Username by using Application.UserName. The Username is what is entered on the General tab of Tools > Options. Inexplicably, you cannot get the user's initials, but you can in some other Office programs. I read a suggestion to automate Publisher and get the user initials via [...] Read More...

Published Thu, Aug 28 2008 5:27 PM by Daily Dose of Excel

Filed under: User Defined Functions, Tools Options

Random Numbers Repeating

I write some data to an Access database, after which I retrieve the Autonumber that Access generates. Prior to writing the data, it sits in a class and all of the classes sit in a collection. The collection needs a unique string for each entry, so I create one until I can the [...] Read More...

Published Wed, Aug 27 2008 12:21 PM by Daily Dose of Excel

Filed under: General, Collections

Twitter

I signed up for Twitter a couple of months ago, made a few posts, and pretty much abandoned it. If you’re not familiar with it, Twitter is a micro-blog. You make posts of 140 characters or less. I don’t follow many people and I’m not sure what value this whole idea has. [...] Read More...

Published Mon, Aug 25 2008 9:12 AM by Daily Dose of Excel

Filed under: Miscellany

The Ultimate Steal

Hi all Great tip: Thanks to Dave Peterson For the student (or families with students): http://www.microsoft.com/student/discounts/theultimatesteal-us/default.aspx Ron de Bruin http://www.rondebruin.nl/tips.htm Read More...

Published Sat, Aug 23 2008 3:44 PM by Daily Dose of Excel

Filed under: General, Excel12

Add missing built-in commands to the QAT or Ribbon

Hi all I add this page to my site last week with a few examples to add missing controls to the Quick Access Toolbar or Ribbon. http://www.rondebruin.nl/notinribbon.htm I am curious which missing built-in commands the readers of this blog have add to the QAT or Ribbon. Tip: John WalkenBach posted a add-in for the speech controls on his site this [...] Read More...

Published Sat, Aug 23 2008 10:05 AM by Daily Dose of Excel

Filed under: General, Excel12

Retirement Calculator

Download 401kalculator.xls.zip Unprotect the sheet (no password) and unhide some columns to see the calculations. Read More...

Published Thu, Aug 21 2008 5:36 PM by Daily Dose of Excel

Filed under: Downloads

Counting Olympic Medals

I saw this article in the LA Times about measuring Olympic Medals per capita. I like the idea, but I also think figuring in the GDP of the country makes sense. The US could throw a lot of money at an individual event and probably fair pretty well. I got the GDP via Wikipedia [...] Read More...

Published Sun, Aug 17 2008 9:32 PM by Daily Dose of Excel

Filed under: Charting

My Coding Technique

Dick has been kind enough to allow me to mirror posts from DDoE, but gets little back. Therefore as a guest poster I thought I would post some ramblings I made today on excel user group regarding my own particular coding techniques. (It also allows him the weekend off) I have recently been doing most of [...] Read More...

Published Fri, Aug 15 2008 5:11 PM by Daily Dose of Excel

Filed under: VBA

My Places on File Dialogs

On the left side of the File Open dialog (and the File Save dialog), there is an area called My Places. My Recent Documents, Desktop, My Documents, My Computer, and My Network Places must be the default, because I’m sure I’ve never added or deleted anything from this list. Recently, Bob Phillips alerted me to [...] Read More...

Published Thu, Aug 14 2008 12:00 PM by Daily Dose of Excel

Filed under: UI File Operations

ShortcutText on Menu Items

CommandBarButtons have a ShortcutText property that you can use to list a command's shortcut next to its menu item. The Cut menu item has Ctrl+X listed next to it. In this example, I make a new menu with one item under it. OnKey is used to assign a keyboard shortcut and the ShortcutText property [...] Read More...

Published Wed, Aug 13 2008 12:21 PM by Daily Dose of Excel

Filed under: CommandBars, Toolbars

Change built-in groups in the Ribbon

Hi all It is not possible to add to or remove controls from built-in groups in the Ribbon. For example, the Format Painter button from the Home tab’s Clipboard group cannot be removed from this group. But there is a way around this restriction. We can hide a built-in group and then duplicate it with RibbonX. And then we can [...] Read More...

Published Thu, Aug 07 2008 3:51 PM by Daily Dose of Excel

Filed under: General, Excel12, User Interface

Data Visualization? Sir, Yes Sir!

Did you ever want to join the army but don’t like all the physical activity? And instead of shooting people you’d rather create charts and dashboards in Excel? If so, you should go to the Excel Dashboard and Visualization Bootcamp. This 3-day boot camp is designed for Excel users who need to more effectively [...] Read More...

Published Mon, Aug 04 2008 5:46 PM by Daily Dose of Excel

Filed under: Links, Products

Increment File Names

I have to save a file that may have the same name as an existing file. If it does, I append a number to the end of it to make it unique. The problem is that the file will live in three different folders in its life; Working, Review, and Archive. I [...] Read More...

Published Sun, Aug 03 2008 10:46 PM by Daily Dose of Excel

Filed under: String Functions, File Operations