Sometimes we get values in our Excel sheets in such a way that the % sign is omitted. So instead of the value being 23%, it is 23. Now, you can very easily correct this by editing the cell and adding a % sign at the end. But what if you have 100s of rows of data. You can’t do this to every cell. (You can not just format the cells to % format either, excel shows 23 as 2300% then). There must be some simple and intuitive solution for this … umm.
Of course there is..
To clean up incorrect percentages just follow these 4 steps.
- Type 100 in an empty cell. Now copy the cell by pressing CTRL+C
- Select cells with incorrect percentages, and press ALT+E S (alternatively right click and select Paste Special)
- Now, Select “Divide” from operation area. See it aside.
- That is all. We have divided all the values in incorrect percentage cells by 100. Make sure the cells are formatted in % style to show 0.23 as 23%.
Bonus: You can remove % signs by multiplying cell values with 100.
Bonus*Bonus: You can convert a bunch of hours to days by dividing them with 24, minutes to hours by dividing with 60 etc.
Bonus Bonus: 15 more ways to use Excel’s paste special. Do you know all of them?
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