Last night I asked members of our Chandoo.org facebook page to share an Excel problem you are struggling with. Francis asked,
How to save a file as .txt in vba without quotes? When I save as .txt, the file has got quotes inside of it. I used the code Print, but it didnt work because the file loses its delimitation.
Does anyone know how to solve this?
Let’s understand how to save a range as text and overcome the double quote problem.
Saving a range as Text – the easy way
Say you have a file like this:
The easy option is to save your worksheet as text file using below macro.
Sub saveText()
ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs filename:= _
ThisWorkBook.Path & "\textfile-" & Format(Now, "ddmmyy-hhmmss") & ".txt", FileFormat:=xlText, _
CreateBackup:=False
End Sub
While this works, it has 2 problems.
- It exports the entire current worksheet.
- It adds double quotes “” to text values or formatted cells.
So you get this.
Saving a range as Text – the proper way
We can create a blank text file using VBA and write the range data values in to that file. This way we will have full control over what goes in to the file and how it’s formatted.
Here is the code:
Sub saveText2()
Dim filename As String, lineText As String
Dim myrng As Range, i, j
filename = ThisWorkbook.Path & "\textfile-" & Format(Now, "ddmmyy-hhmmss") & ".txt"
Open filename For Output As #1
Set myrng = Range("data")
For i = 1 To myrng.Rows.Count
For j = 1 To myrng.Columns.Count
lineText = IIf(j = 1, "", lineText & ",") & myrng.Cells(i, j)
Next j
Print #1, lineText
Next i
Close #1
End Sub
Let’s understand the code…
Create a file name
We take the current workbook path and set up textfile-time stamp.txt in that directory.
Note, the time stamp portion is dynamic and changes every time you run the code.
We then open the file using Open filename For Output As #1 line.
This sets up a new file and opens it for us to write anything we want.
Loop thru range data and write values to the file
We loop thru each and every cell of the range("data"). We need to take all the values in a row and concatenate them with delimiter comma (,).
This is done in nested for loops (related: Introduction to For loop- Excel VBA)
We loop thru each column in a row and construct lineText.
We then print this lineText to file #1 using,
Print #1, lineText
Finally we close the file.
The end result
This is what we get.
Download Save Text example macro
Click here to download the example workbook. Examine the savetext macro to learn more.
How do you create text files using VBA?
Do you create text / CSV / TSV files from Excel data? How do you automate the process? Please share your tips and ideas in the comments section.
Learn more powerful ways to use VBA:
7 Responses to “Project Dashboard + Tweetboard = pure awesomeness!!!”
I would like to see actual hash-tagged DM tweets go out to the specific information consumers. That would be an interesting way to communicate the key daily data to interested parties.
A Twitter-like secure application like Yammer might be a good fit with this.
For example, how about daily tweets to selected user groups (secure) that would display sales, bookings, cash receipts, cash disbursed and a second version that would show the same info for MTD, QTD or YTD figures.
@Dan, it would be great. I did not taught about implementing it on this dashboard because twitter is blocked to the whole intranet here. However, there's a discussion here about how can we send these tweets to blackberries (probably through e-mail) automatically. (I'd like to see this implemented on a jabber restricted network as well, but here it'll probably not happen)
The wrap-up versions you mentioned doesn't apply to my particular scenario, but on a sales tweetboard it would be a great tool indeed - choosing who will receive which message according to hashtags. I'll think on something, thanks for the advice. 🙂
(Ah, btw, I'm Fernando... 🙂 )
@Dan: That is a fun idea. Instead of tightly integrating twitter functionality with a dashboard, i think it would be cool if we have a "tweet this" button that users can click after selecting a range of cells. We can easily show a dialog with the concatenated output of the selected cells and ask user to edit the text and eventually "send to twitter".
For eg. you can select the annual sales figure cell and click on "tweet this" button upon which a dialog will show the value. Then you can pre-pend it something like "DM @boss look at our sales this year: "
@Aires.. thanks once again.
Wow it looks really good. Not sure though how much the tweet facility would help in real world project management, but certainly having a dashboard on a project should be a key deliverable when learning how to manage a project
The other use of this is during the software development life cycle especially when you have parallel streams of development and testing going on. Using a dashboard is a quick way for everyone on the team to see where the project is at and how it all fits together.
Regards
Susan de Sousa
Site Editor http://www.my-project-management-expert.com
Hi Chandoo,
I purchased the project management toolkit but the dashboard shown above with the imbedded scroll bars. Is it included in the project pack??
Thanks
Sue
The gantt chart section of this dashboard is similar to one I have recently created: http://xlcalibre.com/hr-dashboard-gantt-chart-traffic-light-reportIt has a similar approach with scroll bars, but has a couple of additional features. I've tried to incorporate a traffic light report element, and also allow the timescale to adjusted so that can view it by days, weeks or months.I really like the other tables that you've incorporated, I may well try to replicate them to improve my version!
I am a monitoring and evaluation consultant in international development, and one of the services I offer is to help non-profits and foundations develop performance dashboards. I often advise them to develop dashboards for ongoing programs, rather than for one-time or pilot projects, because of the time involved. I am trying to find out from a few people how long it takes you to develop a project management dashboard, and to what extent the indicators vary from one project to the next.