We all know that incell charts are a very cool way to explore and visualize data. Personally I like them so much that I have written several tutorials on it here. Today we will see how a Job dashboard on “50 best cities for finding a job” originally prepared by Indeed job search engine can be recreated in Excel using In-cell charts.
The original dashboard looked like this:
We can re-create it in Excel with the following steps.
Step1 : Get the data
Of course this is very simple. I went to the web page and copied the data. Pasted it in to a text file and cleaned it up until it is ready. Then I imported the data to excel by using Import Text to Columns feature.
Step 2 : Find the symbols for Person and Employment vacancy icons
This is even more simpler. I just went to Insert > Symbol and selected “Webdings” font. The person icon is available there. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any character that looks like a chair. So I have used the computer icon (available in wingdings font).
Step 3 : Create the In-cell Chart
All we have to do is write REPT Excel Formula.
Step 4 : Add the final touches
If you look at the original chart, it also has up and down arrows to show when the ranking of the city has changed compared to previous reporting period. I have used custom cell formatting to achieve this effect. The custom formatting code used is:
[Blue]"? "0;[Red]"? "0;;
I have also adjusted the font colors and did some table formatting (like adding borders, removing gridlines etc.).
Final In-cell Dashboard of 50 Best Cities for Finding a Job
This is the final outcome
Download the Incell Dashboard on Best Cities to Find Jobs
You can download the in-cell job dashboard from here [.zip version]
Conclusions
As I said, in-cell charts are lot more fun, lot more easier to build and play with and they add variety to your dashboards, reports and general visualizations. Experiment with an in-cell chart today see if they work for you.
Further Resources on In-cell Charting & Dashboards
- Incell Bar Chart Tutorial
- Incell Sparklines Tutorial
- Incell Pie charts Tutorial
- Incell Bullet Graphs Tutorial
- Incell Dot Plots Tutorial
- Incell charts w/ Conditional Formatting
- Excel Dashboards – Tutorials, Tips and Techniques
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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