Few days back, I ran my first ever webinar, on a topic called, “How to be a BETTER Analyst?” (here is the replay link, in case you missed it). It was a huge success. More than 1,100 people attended the live webinar and hundreds more watched the replay. As part of the webinar, we had interactive Q&A. Viewers posted their questions and I replied to as many of them as I can.
After the webinar, I wanted to make sure I covered all the questions. So I downloaded the chat history. There were more than 700 messages in it. And I am not in the mood to read line by line to find-out the questions. A good portion of chat messages were not questions but stuff like ‘hello everyone, I am from Idaho’, ‘Wow, Chandoo has beard!”, “Enjoying a beer in Belgium while watching webinar” etc. So I wanted a quick way to flag the messages as question or not.
I did what any sensible Excel analyst would do.
I made myself a hot cup of coffee, started playing games on my iPhone while sipping it.
Of course after a cup of coffee and a bout of Candy Crush, I wrote simple Excel formula to find-out if the text in a cell is question or not. Let me share the formula & logic with you.
Let’s take a look at the data
This is how the downloaded chat history looked like when imported to Excel. The column on right is where we need to write formula to find out if the comment is a question or not.
For the sake of simplicity, assume this data is in column B, starting with cell B5.
The logic for identifying questions
In real life, finding if the other person is asking a question or just saying something can be tricky. For example, last evening my wife said, “Shall we go shopping?” and I assumed it was a question and said “no”. Apparently, it wasn’t a question. You can guess the rest.
Unlike real life, in Excel, we can come up with good enough approximation to nail down questions.
For example, if a cell contains any of the below words, we can say it is a question.
What, why, how, who, when, where, is it, can I, can you, which, is this, are you, can we, are we, am I
This is a pretty good way to separate questions from non-questions.
Let’s assume all the question words are maintained in a named range called q.words
Writing the formula
So here is the formula to check if a cell contains question or not.
=SUMPRODUCT(COUNTIFS(B5,"*"&q.words&"*"))>0
How does this formula work?
Remember, B5 is the cell in question (no pun).
We need to see anywhere in B5, one of the question words occur.
This is where COUNTIFS formula helps. It can count how many times a value has occurred in a range.
In our case, if B5 contains any of the question words. Note that B5 can contain other text too (apart from question words).
The formula COUNTIFS(B5,"*"&q.words&"*") will return an array of size 15 (as q.words contains 15 question words).
Let’s assume B5 has the text – “Why didn’t you take your wife to shopping?”
So, our COUNTIFS(B5...) will return the array {0;1;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0}
The second item is 1 because second question word is Why.
If B5 has this text – “How I wish I took my wife to shopping. Can I take her now?”
COUNTIFS(..) will return this array {0;0;1;0;0;0;0;1;0;0;0;0;0;0;0} because it found the question words How and Can I.
But we don’t want the array…
You are right. We don’t need the array of 15 elements. We just want to know if any of the questions are present in the B5 cell.
So, we pass this array to SUMPRODUCT, which sums up all the numbers and tells us single value.
We then check if this value is >0 or not.
So there you have it. A formula to find out if a cell has question or not.
A question for you…
Do you conduct text analysis using Excel? What techniques do you use? Please share your approach & formulas in the comments.
Bonus material for text analysis using Excel
If you deal with lots of text data, you will find below resources very useful.
- Finding patterns in Text – case study problem
- Extracting file name from full path
- Analyzing search keywords & finding word frequency
- Analyzing 20,000 comments – Case study
- Sentiment analysis of text using Excel
- More on text processing & analysis using Excel
Now if you excuse me, I need to take my wife for shopping. 🙂
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?