On Jan 4, I received this email from Matt,
Thank you for sharing all of your knowledge on such an incredible website. Your site has such an incredible array of useful tips, tricks, and solutions to every day problems, I don’t know what I would do without it! It’s the only place I go to look for help when I’m stumped with excel. Thanks to you, I’ve become an “excel wizard,” and have been able to show coworkers mind blowing new things with excel they never knew about. I even taught a 4 week training class at my old job! Over the past 3 years, tips I’ve learned from your site have been appreciated all the way in Seattle, Washington, at an internet marketing company, a newspaper, and a food website.
While the mail is flattering, I was more interested to know how Matt uses Excel in his day to day work. So I asked him to write a small guest post sharing his experiences. He gladly accepted the offer and here were are, with a post full of tips & ideas to help you. I am sure many business analysts, analysts and managers out there can co-relate to Matt’s experience.
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Guest Article by Matt Decuir
At Allrecipes.com we use excel for a variety of purposes. Analyzing site trends, forecasting traffic, charts, dashboards, and slide shows; you name it, we use excel for it. That’s why Chandoo’s tips have been so helpful – because we use excel every day. Thanks to chandoo.org, I’ve developed a reputation as an “excel wizard” and even taught a 4 week excel training class!
Most of your colleagues are probably like mine – they’ve got a pretty good understanding of excel. They use formulas and charts regularly, occasionally experimenting with Pivot Tables. As a Chandoo reader, you’re probably already an excel expert or well on your way to becoming one. But even more important than your excel expertise is the ability to communicate helpful tips to others. Regardless of your audience, complicated formulas can be difficult to explain. If you can point out tips that are within your colleagues’ comprehension, you will quickly become an excel rock star. The trick is to know your audience.
Here are a few simple tips that will wow your colleagues:
- Autofill: Instead of wasting time scrolling and dragging a formula all the way down the page, your colleagues will be amazed that double clicking on the AutoFill icon will automatically do it for them.
- One co-worker affectionately calls this the “double click trick“
- Transpose: Need to change how your data is oriented? Not sure exactly how to phrase what you’re trying to do? Just Paste Special and check the Transpose box and your data will magically be transformed from horizontal to vertical.
- Keyboard Shortcuts: Scrolling is the enemy. Nobody wants to waste their whole day scrolling to the bottom of a spreadsheet. Here are a few keyboard shortcuts that will save time:
- CTRL + down arrow:To get to the bottom row of your data set
- CTRL +up arrow: To get the top row of your data set
- CTRL + right arrow: To get to the last column of your data set
- CTRL + left arrow: To get to the first column of your data set
- CTRL + Home: To get to the first cell (top left) in your data set
- CTRL + End: To get to the last cell (bottom right) in your data set
- Bonus: Holding SHIFT down while using any of the above shortcuts will select that entire range
- Charts: Charts are confusing. They never do what you want them to do. Most people have used charts before, but are in no way experts. You’ll win points if you can explain how to:
- Add a secondary axis
- Create a combination chart with both bar and line graphs
- Pivot Tables: Pivot Tables are daunting to most people who don’t use them regularly. If you can help your colleagues navigate the treacherous waters of Pivot Tables, they will definitely appreciate it. Keep it simple though, as the flexibility can get overwhelming to new users very quickly.
- Start by creating a Pivot Table to answer 1 question. Then explain how to filter and sort the data. By doing this, your colleagues will slowly warm to Pivot Tables, making them less overwhelming.
Now that you’ve got some simple tips in your repertoire, here are the formulas and tools I use the most:
Lookup and Text Formulas:
- SUMIFS, AVERAGEIFS, and COUNTIFS: Like SUMIF on steroids. Useful for looking up any non-text values with multiple criteria
- Great for recreating the functionality of a Pivot, but allowing you to format the output however you would like
- Makes month over month calculations extremely easy, especially with named cells.
- VLOOKUP, INDEX, and MATCH: Useful for looking up any text values
- Always make sure to end your VLOOKUP with FALSE to return the exact match
- IFERROR: Replaces errors with a different value
- i.e. IFERROR(A1/B1,0) replaces errors with zeroes
- LEFT, MID, RIGHT, and SEARCH: Useful for parsing specific parts out of URLs
Date Formulas:
- TODAY(): Automatically calculates today’s date
- DATE: Useful for calculating specific days in the year
- i.e. DATE(YEAR(TODAY()),1,1) calculates the first day of the year (“1/1/2011”)
- EDATE: Increments a date by X number of months. Negative numbers also work to go backwards.
- i.e. EDATE(A1,1) increments a date by 1 month (“2/1/2011”)
- TEXT: Converts a value to any date format you would like
- i.e. TEXT(A1,”dddd”) converts a date into day of the week (“Monday”)
- i.e. TEXT(A1,”mmmm”) converts a date into a month (“January”)
- WEEKDAY: Returns the day number in the week.
- i.e. WEEKDAY($A1,2)>5 returns TRUE for weekends
Charts:
- Dynamic Chart Ranges: Use OFFSET and named ranges to only chart cells that have values. This saves time because you don’t have to update chart data ranges each month
- Alternatively, returning errors (#N/A) when values are blank will also exclude empty cells from line and bar charts
- Rolling Chart Data Ranges: Set a static number of months and use SUMIFS to populate values automatically
- Dynamic Chart Data Labels: Great for showing month over month % change, instead of default data labels
Other Tools:
- Named ranges: Useful for referencing calculated dates, lookup formulas, data validation lists, creating dashboards, etc…
- CTRL + F3: shows all the named ranges in your spreadsheet
- Data Validation: For creating drop down lists
- Named ranges allow you to reference a list of values in a separate tab
- Conditional Formatting: For formatting everything!
- Highlight Cell Rules: Highlights positive values in green, negative values in red
- Custom Formula Rules: Useful for shading weekends in gray when looking at a whole month’s data by day (i.e. WEEKDAY($A1,2)>5)
- Data Bars: Shows a tiny bar chart within the cell. Good for showing trends within a data table
I hope these tips help you become a rock star among your friends and colleagues!
Matt Decuir
Business Analyst, Allrecipes.com
(decuirm at gmail dot com)
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Thank you Matt
Thanks for sharing your experiences and ideas so openly. This proves that to be a successful analyst, good understanding of numbers and tools is necessary.
If you like this article, say thanks to Matt. Also tell us how you are using Excel to become awesome at work. Go ahead and leave a comment.
28 Responses to “Pimp your comment boxes [because it is Friday]”
This borders on Excel soft-cell...er, soft-core...porn. My favorite kind.
Wow, that is pimp-TASTIC! I have a question, as a VBA n00b: additional comment boxes stay plain unless I "run" the macro. Is there a way to change all comments, going-forward?
hi Chandoo, well, I like the macro approach. For those who don't like it, there is another way: just add the "draw" toolbar to the shapes toolbar (via Custom etc), click on "edit comment", click on the auto-shape and then choose "draw" drop-down, --> modify auto-shape --> then you even can have a heart or a banner (I like the horizontal banner in in purple :-)) . in excel 2007, you have to add this custom menu that you choose via Excel Options --> Custom --> it is called "change/ modify auto-shape"!!!
best,
@Chandoo. Great Post 🙂
@Tim : the way the macro is coded, it must be run very time.
@Community: If someone has an idea to perform it when opening an existing excel, it should be nice.
@Community: if someone has some code to revamp the commentboxes on all sheets, please share it. 🙂
@Microsoft Excel-progammers: some pimpoptions for the commentboxes should be great.
Cheerio
Tom
For the auto run, please add the codes in workbook:
Private Sub Workbook_SheetActivate(ByVal Sh As Object)
Call Comments_Tom
End Sub
Wow, that was a lot of fun... Thanks Tom!
@Jeff... Now, 5000 people know about your favorite porn... 😛
@Tim ... you can write an event to handle the new comments. I wouldnt recommend it as it is really painful. another option is to use the macro suggested by Yukikomi. It will update comments everytime you activate the sheet.
@laguerriere: very cool 🙂
@Chandoo ... Thanks! This is good stuff. I combined your tip with a tip from Mark O'Brien, then assigned it to a button on Excel 2010's Quick Access Toolbar, to format comments AS I add them. I also like how Mark's code saves me the trouble of backspacing my name out of new comments:
Sub AppendToExistingComment()
'Source: Mark O'Brien at http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/showthread.php?t=57296
Dim oRange As Range
Dim oComment As Comment
Dim sText As String
'Use object variable to hold range.
Set oRange = ActiveCell
'Use object variable for comment
Set oComment = oRange.Comment
'text to be added to the comment box
sText = InputBox("Type text to be added:", "APPEND TO COMMENT TEXT")
If Len(sText) = 0 Then End
'If Active Cell has a comment then append new text to the end of the comment text
If Not oComment Is Nothing Then
sText = oComment.Text & vbNewLine & sText
oRange.Comment.Delete
End If
'Add a comment with the contents of sText
oRange.AddComment sText
DoEvents
Comments_Tom
End Sub
Thank you very much for the code, it seems to be working for the most part; I am having a problem however. Once the routine makes the corrections to the comment, the comment becomes invisible. By invisible, I mean that when I highlight my mouse over it, nothing appears. However, when I right click the cell and click 'edit comment' then the comment becomes visible and I enter edit mode. Upon clicking out of the comment, it simply vanishes again. I've tried to fix this problem by adding a .shape.visible = msoTrue but then every comment is always visible. o_O please advise...
Thank you,
Nick
@Nick- That is because the font color of the comment is white and when you select the color of selection is also white hence you can not see anything. Try to change the color code in the routine to something else. would work
Thanks for that! The code works perfectly!
[...] look at Format Excel Comment Boxes using VBA Macros | Chandoo.org - Learn Microsoft Excel Online [...]
@ Chandoo - code works great and the comments look super cool. But I have ran into a small issue. In the comments, I am inserting pictures. When I run the macro, for all comments which already have pictures; pictures are deleted. Pls help me retain the pics in comments.
[…] posted some code one of his readers submitted, it "pimps" your comment boxes from those boring black-text-on-yellow rectangles to something more professional and eye-pleasing. […]
love in it
Hi Tom,
This looks really excellent. I am however relatively new to macros / VBA codes so having copy pasted your code in the Developer mode of an Excel file, what are the next steps to use them? Can you please help? Just to recap, I opened a blank Excel workbook, clicked on Developer, copy pasted the comments code and saved the file to the desktop.
Now how do I go about using it to add comments to an existing file? My apologies for asking a question which may be basic to you great geniuses, but I am not there yet and aspire to get there.
Many thanks for helping me with next steps that I need to take so that I can now use the code.
Best Wishes
Deepak Dave, CMA, MBA, PMP
Senior Management Consultant
Dear Dave,
The best thing to do is to copy the macro in the personal.xls(x) file. The personal excel file will always be launched when you open excel so you can use it with every excelworkbook.
Read all about it on the page of Microsoft.
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Copy-your-macros-to-a-Personal-Macro-Workbook-aa439b90-f836-4381-97f0-6e4c3f5ee566
Once you have the macro in the personal, you can 'call' the macro by the keyboardcombination 'alt+f8' and klik on the macroname.
Hope this clarifies the 'how to'. Good luck with your first steps in the wonderfull world of macro's.
Tom
Hi Tom,
Many thanks. I will try that out. Learning is fun and learning this stuff is even more amazing.
Best Wishes
Deepak Dave
There is a line 'Dim LArea As Long' which does not appear to be used. Have I missed something?
Dear Gary,
Correct the 'Dim LArea As Long' is indeed not relevant and can be deleted.
Tom
Excellent hack!
For some reason when I opened my file after using LibreOffice Calc, all comment boxes had changed to some arrow shape.
So this macro helped me from manually changing more than 5000 comments in a worksheet, or having to install some Excel extension.
I used it with the following attributes to get back old style comments:
It helped me from manually changing more than 5000 comments in a worksheet, or having to install some Excel extension.
.Shape.AutoShapeType = msoShapeRectangle
.Shape.TextFrame.Characters.Font.Name = "Calibri"
.Shape.TextFrame.Characters.Font.Size = 10
.Shape.TextFrame.AutoMargins = True
.Shape.TextFrame.AutoSize = True
Thanks a lot!
This was helpful, thank you
I think this is among the most significant
information for me. And i am glad reading your article.
But wanna remark on some general things, The site style is great,
the articles is really great : D. Good job, cheers
Is there code to add to this that will format a particular part of the comment (i.e. make the last sentence in the comment bold and in italics)?
This is fantastic!
How would I add auto-sizing to it?
I tried adding this:
.Shape.AutoSize = True but it gives me an error and as a novice at VBA I can't figure it out.
.Shape.TextFrame.AutoSize = True
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This is GREAT!
How should the code be changed in order to tun once for all worksheets in a workbook?