Often, we need to input special symbols like €£¥©½» in to our Excel sheets. Now, how do we do that?
Simple, you can use Insert > Symbol to add several different kinds of symbols.
See this animation to understand how you can add symbols to an excel cell. (the file is kind of big, so give it a few seconds to load)
5 Bonus tips on using Symbols:
- You can just double click on the character to insert it. No need to press Insert button.
- You can quickly open insert symbol dialog by pressing ALT+I and then S. (related: 97 keyboard shortcuts to boost your excel mojo)
- You can use the symbols in formulas too. For eg. you can show ? or ? or ? based on change of one value wrt to another. Like this:
- =if(A1>A2, “↑”, if(A1<A2,”↓”,”↔”)) (related: in-cell charts)
- Quickly access symbols to specific to currency, arrows or greek chars (if you are in to that sort of thing) by using the drop-down at top-right (see above demo).
- Change the font to Wingdings / Webdings to see some useful and fun characters. You can spice dashboards or reports with these.
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