Check out the sample mobile analytics dashboard by Percent Mobile. It is like google analytics, but for mobile device based traffic. I liked the way they presented the information of website traffic that is coming from mobile devices.
What is WOW about it?
The top portion of the dashboard shows quick summary. This is one of the key principles of any good dashboard. Displaying summary at the top and providing detail at bottom. This creates a logical flow and viewer can decide for herself which details to seek.
The bar charts below are executed well. Often we are tempted to use colors and rich formatting, but when you use simple colors, then naturally the attention shifts from formatting to information. I like the way the charts look subtle but still provide good information, thanks to labels.
What can be improved in this chart?
The mobile ecosystem area of the dashboard looks good but it is difficult to spot any trends. Few things I can think of to improve this are,
- Reduce the number of phones displayed here to say Top 5
- Try something else like a tag cloud, but with images. It adds novelty and drives attention to most important devices.
- Restructure information by dimensions like touch-screen devices, gaming devices, good old mobile phones so that viewer will know what type of devices are visiting the site more.
What is your opinion on this dashboard?
Cool or awful? How would you improve it?
More on dashboards: KPI Dashboards using Excel (6 part tutorial and downloads), Excel Dashboards theory, principles and tutorials
[Hat tip to Digital Inspiration for percent mobile]
6 Responses to “Make VBA String Comparisons Case In-sensitive [Quick Tip]”
Another way to test if Target.Value equal a string constant without regard to letter casing is to use the StrCmp function...
If StrComp("yes", Target.Value, vbTextCompare) = 0 Then
' Do something
End If
That's a cool way to compare. i just converted my values to strings and used the above code to compare. worked nicely
Thanks!
In case that option just needs to be used for a single comparison, you could use
If InStr(1, "yes", Target.Value, vbTextCompare) Then
'do something
End If
as well.
Nice tip, thanks! I never even thought to think there might be an easier way.
Regarding Chronology of VB in general, the Option Compare pragma appears at the very beginning of VB, way before classes and objects arrive (with VB6 - around 2000).
Today StrComp() and InStr() function offers a more local way to compare, fully object, thus more consistent with object programming (even if VB is still interpreted).
My only question here is : "what if you want to binary compare locally with re-entering functions or concurrency (with events) ?". This will lead to a real nightmare and probably a big nasty mess to debug.
By the way, congrats for you Millions/month visits 🙂
This is nice article.
I used these examples to help my understanding. Even Instr is similar to Find but it can be case sensitive and also case insensitive.
Hope the examples below help.
Public Sub CaseSensitive2()
If InStr(1, "Look in this string", "look", vbBinaryCompare) = 0 Then
MsgBox "woops, no match"
Else
MsgBox "at least one match"
End If
End Sub
Public Sub CaseSensitive()
If InStr("Look in this string", "look") = 0 Then
MsgBox "woops, no match"
Else
MsgBox "at least one match"
End If
End Sub
Public Sub NotCaseSensitive()
'doing alot of case insensitive searching and whatnot, you can put Option Compare Text
If InStr(1, "Look in this string", "look", vbTextCompare) = 0 Then
MsgBox "woops, no match"
Else
MsgBox "at least one match"
End If
End Sub