Displaying & Selecting a Scenario using VBA [Modeling in Excel]

If you are building financial models or any other type of excel based decision models, chances are, there will be multiple scenarios in your model. Whenever you have multiple scenarios, you may want an easy, intuitive way to select one of them. In this post, I will present an interesting scenario display & selection technique that I received by email from our reader Itay Maor.

First see the scenario selection in action:

Download the sample workbook with scenario selection macro

Click here to download the workbook (.xlsm file) that Itay emailed me.

How does this work?

In order to understand how this works, first you must know the limitations of this file. It  can only support up to 5 scenarios.

The workbook has a bunch of macros – ChangeScenario, AddTab, RemoveTab, RenameTab etc.

Here is how the magic behind this macro is cast:

1. When you click any tab, that particular scenario’s input values are loaded by running ChangeScenario macro
2. When you click the ‘x’ button, that particular scenario’s tab is hidden and other tabs are moved accordingly by running the macro RemoveTab.
3. When you click the ‘+’ button, a new scenario tab is displayed by un-hiding one of the remaining tabs. This uses the macro AddTab.
4. When you close the workbook, the tab order, scenario values are all preserved automatically.

The workbook uses very simple but clever macros to hide / un-hide tabs and display and select scenarios. I encourage you to dissect the macros and play with the file to understand it better. Go here to download the file.

Thank you Itay,

Thank you so much for sharing your work with us Itay. I have learned some valuable macro tricks exploring your code. I am sure our readers will be able to learn something from it. Thank you.

How do you handle multiple scenarios?

I never used a technique like Itay’s. Usually I prefer a scenario selection sheet with data validation and conditional formatting (more on this later in a post). I would like to know how you handle multiple scenarios. Please share using comments.

Share your workbooks, example files with us

I am always looking for new and interesting ways to solve problems using Excel. If you have something fun, exciting or useful to share, please email me your workbook / tip / article to at chandoo.d @ gmail.com. I would love to learn from you and share your ideas with others here.