Most of you know that during day time I work as a business analyst. Today while preparing some test scenarios for our latest insurance application, I came across a weird problem.
There are some steps in testing. For each test scenario, a combination of these steps is required. It is my responsibility to identify the steps as well as their combinations for each of the scenarios. So I quickly prepared a table with all the steps in left most column and one scenario each in one column. I put “X” in a cell if the step needs to appear in that scenario. But when I gave it to our testing team, they asked me if the scenarios can be explained a little better. See this picture to understand what they want and what I made.
So I immediately converted the “X”s to actual step names using a simple IF formula. (Copied the table, and wrote ‘if there is an X in the previous table, get the actual step from left most column otherwise empty‘).
Then the problem of actually removing various blank cells. First I tried to select all the blank cells and remove them using our technique from last week. But it failed as the blank cells are actually formulas with empty values. So I copy pasted the entire table as values (CTRL+C, ALT+ESV). But even then excel wont recognize blanks as true blanks (because the value is actually “” instead of being plain empty.)
Now I didnt want to manually select all the blank cells as the real testing scenario table had 50 scenarios with 68 possible steps.
Then it stuck me, why not use FIND (CTRL+F) to find all the cells containing nothing? So I selected the scenario table, opened the find and looked up all the cells that contain empty values. Now I clicked on “Find all” and selected the entire list of values from that. Finally I removed all these cells and bingo!
PS: Our testers was more than happy as it took very little time and they had all the scripts ready.
PPS: Thanks to Rick, who taught me FIND ALL approach to select blank cells (here).
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