In the 7th session of Chandoo.org podcast, lets make you aweSUM().

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What is in this session?
Imagine for a second that Excel cannot add up numbers. And no it cant subtract them either. What would that look like?
A glorified Notepad. That’s right. Excel’s ability to add up numbers, along with features like formulas, charts, pivot tables & BHATTEXT() are what make it such a lovely software. May be not the BHATTEXT(), but we all agree that Excel is so versatile and useful because it can add up numbers (and perform other calculations) with ease.
But how well do you know the SUM formulas of Excel?
In this podcast, you will learn,
- Special personal fruit announcement 😛
- + operator
- Status bar & total rows in tables
- Auto Sum feature
- SUM() function
- SUMIFS function
- When to use it
- Examples
- Special cases of SUMIFS function
- Sum of all positive numbers
- Sum of all numbers for March 2014
- Sum of all customers with name = taco bell
- SUBTOTAL & AGGREGATE functions
- Other summing functions
- SUMIF
- SUMPRODUCT
- DSUM
- Conclusions
Go ahead and listen to the show
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Links & Resources mentioned in this session:
Resources to learn SUM functions
- Functions
- Excel Tables
- Examples
Transcript of this session:
Download this podcast transcript [PDF]
How awesome are your SUM skills?
SUM formulas are corner stone of any dashboard or report or meaningful model. So it no surprise that I use them often. My favorite sum formula is SUMIFS(). It is versatile and powerful. I am learning to love DSUM() too. I will share details about it in an upcoming article.
Meanwhile, tell me what is your favorite SUM formula? What are the tricks and techniques you use when writing SUM formulas? Please share your thoughts using comments.

















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