Introducing…Structured References for PivotTables
Howdy folks. Jeff here, bringing you a Public Service Announcement: Thanks to the magic of VBA , Structured PivotTable References are coming to a PivotTable near you! Structured References for PivotTables? So what? Well, because PivotTables are the best bit of ‘old’ Excel, and Tables are the best thing about ‘new’ Excel, and it’s about […]
VBA Serenity
Greetings and salutations, my fellow VBA-fearin’ congregation. Evangelizin’ Jeff here, spreading the good word about everlastin’ VBA serenity. You may remember me from mah preeeevious sermons such as Tables, PivotTables, and Macros: music to your ears and Big trouble in little spreadsheet. Well today, I’m going to praise the work of a high-yah pow-wah. Our […]
Tables, PivotTables, and Macros: music to your ears
Howdy folks. Jeff Weir here again. You may remember me from posts such as What would James Bond have in his Personal Macro Workbook and my now infamous music review. Today – and this truly will be music to some ears – we’re going to concentrate more on the former and less on the latter. […]
Why you should close down Excel completely
Edit: WARNING…This is NOT a post on Excel No. Sorry ’bout that. Well, kinda sorry. To quote John Lydgate: “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”. If you […]
Handle Volatile Functions like they are dynamite
If you’re building large models, then you may want to use volatile functions – including OFFSET(), INDIRECT(), and TODAY() – with caution, because unless you know what you are doing, they *might* slow Excel down to the point that data entry is sluggish, if not downright tedious.
In fact, you *might* want to consider getting out of the habit of using these functions at all if there are alternatives, and you might want to replace volatile functions in your existing models with non-volatile alternatives…I have reduced recalculation time in large models from minutes to milliseconds by doing just that!
So what the heck does volatile actually mean? And why should you care? Let’s find out, shall we?
Robust Dynamic (Cascading) Dropdowns Without VBA
Recently I posted about how you could construct dynamic (cascading) dropdowns that could easily handle multiple levels, like this: …and we saw that users could subsequently change upstream dropdowns in a way that would make downstream choices invalid, like this: In my previous post I used some VBA to clear out any ‘downstream’ choices if […]
Dynamic (Cascading) Dropdowns that reset on change
Dynamic dropdowns are a handy way to get your users to make choices based on what they’ve previously chosen, while steering them away from making invalid choices. Today we’re going to look at one that easily handles multiple levels, and we’ll take a look at what could go wrong. Let’s see one in action, shall […]