Here is a quick pivot table tip.
When reporting summaries by month, it would be better to highlight 3 months at a time (Jan, Feb, Mar in one color, Apr, May, Jun in another color) than showing all in one color. Today, lets learn how to do this in easiest possible way.
Highlight Quarters (3 months at a time) using Pivot Table Styles
We can use pivot table styles for this. Just follow below steps:
- Select the pivot table which you want to format
- Go to Design tab & select a pivot table style you want.
- Right click on the style and choose Duplicate
- Select “First Row Stripe” from modify screen. Enter stripe size as 3.
- Repeat this step for Second row stripe too.
- Click ok.
- IMPORTANT 1: Apply this new style to your pivot report.
- IMPORTANT 2: Check the banded rows option from Design tab.
Using this technique, you can also highlight weekends in a different color with first row stripe size = 5 and second = 2. See a demo here.
More on this tip: Customize banded rows / columns in tables
Note: This approach works only when your months start on Jan (or other quarter starts like April, July or October) and days start on Monday. Most business data is like that anyway.
Bonus tip: Generate monthly report from daily data
You can use group dates feature in Pivot reports to generate monthly (or quarterly, yearly) reports from daily data. Learn how to do this.
Do you use Pivot table styles?
Formatting a pivot report is often painful. That is where styles can help us. Once you define the correct styles, your pivot reports will look professional and neat. So go ahead and try them. Share your feedback, tips using comments.
More on Pivot Tables
Along with formulas, Pivot tables are best friends of Excel analysts. They can take massive amounts of data, process and summarize in just a few clicks. To learn more about them, use below resources.
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