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 time their strengths were brought together:
- Tables magically expand to accommodate anything you put in them. Even better, because of the automated Dynamic Named Ranges built into Tables – called Structured Table References – any Formulas, Charts, Data Validation lists, or conditional formatting formulas that point to that table will instantly be updated with the latest data. And any PivotTables that point to that table will automatically include the new data whenever you refresh them. (Read more here).
- PivotTables allow you to do serious yet effortless number crunching without the need for a single formula. Just as well, because the kinds of formulas you need to replicate what a PivotTable can do easily are often mind-bogglingly complex, and very resource intensive. So using a PivotTable instead of formulas means that people that inherit your spreadsheet are less likely to struggle to follow what you’re doing, and the spreadsheet is less likely to suffer from slow recalculation issues. (Although yes, you will have to refresh that PivotTable from time to time. But that’s a small price to pay.) But there’s a problem with PivotTables: they don’t have any kind of inbuilt Dynamic Named Ranges like Tables do. And so because their structure is very likely to change whenever new data is added or a user decides to filter or rearrange the order or number of field displayed, then any formulas that point at PivotTable ranges will have to be changed manually. (With the exception of a single cell in the Data area referenced by the GETPIVOTDATA() function). So PivotTables are great for getting a result, but lousy for passing on those results to other parts of your spreadsheet.
Who knows why MS haven’t already implemeted Structured Referencing for PivotTables. But why wait for Microsoft to get around to it. Let’s just do it ourselves!
Download the sample file to see my hand-built Structured PivotTable Referencing in action: DynamicPivotRanges_20141019 unprotected
Open it, enable macros, and you’ll see a PivotTable like this:
Now, click on the arrow to the right of the name box, and you’ll see this:
As you can see, in my implementation of Structured PivotTable References, the automatic name that gets generated is prefixed with the Sheet name for uniqueness and uses a period to separate the Sheetname, PivotTable name, and FieldName. So it differs slightly from the notation that Tables use. But it’s every bit as handy.
For instance, check out what happens when I start typing a formula somewhere:
Awesome: That’s pretty much the same kind of thing I get when I want to reference a Table:
Let’s see if it handles changes in the structure of a PivotTable, shall we? Here, the Pivot is filtered in such a way that only 5 rows of data are returned. I’ve selected the entire State region, so that you can see that this corresponds with the automatically generated Structured PivotTable Reference shown in the Name box:
If I change the City filter to include additional cities, then the data returned grows by a few rows, as you can see below. Check out how the Structured PivotTable Reference automatically updated to accommodate the extra rows:
…and if I change the layout of the PivotTable by bringing in a new field – such as the BloodType field shown below – then as you can see, the Structured PivotTable Reference picks up the change too, and recognizes that the State field has shifted to the right:
If you change the Sheet name, then the SheetName part of the Structured PivotTable References syntax get updated next time the Pivot gets refreshed. And if you change the PivotName, then that part of the Structured PivotTable References syntax gets updated immediately. Unfortunately the same doesn’t occur for changes to PivotField names. So if you change the name of a field, any formulas pointing at the associated Structured Reference will need to be updated. This is shown below:
So there you have it: a proof-of-concept implementation of Structured PivotTable References. I’ve been using this to create complicated non-PivotCharts from Pivots, such as ScatterPlots (which are not supported in PivotCharts), or to serve up data labels to non-Pivot charts. And also to avoid having to have lots of extra formulas down the side of my PivotTable just to handle growth.
Take it for a spin, and let me know your thoughts and suggestions for improvements in the comments. Who knows…someone at Microsoft might even see this, and think “Now why didn’t WE think of that?”
What other functionality is missing from Excel that you’d like to see added?
While the things that Excel can do are cool, Excel often makes us jump through an awful lot of hoops – and click through an awful lot of dialog boxes – in order to actually do them. At the same time, there’s lots of things we routinely do that Excel simply doesn’t provide tools handy tools for. The end result is this: for every millisecond that Excel actually does some real work, we’ve probably spent hours ‘prepping’ it to do it.
Whenever we have to do lots of manual steps in order to leverage Excel’s cool inbuilt functionality, then Excel is programming us. It’s like some kind of epic experiment in behavioral psychology; and we’re the mice. It should be the other way around.
Fortunately, VBA (Macros) gives us the means to program Excel so that it behaves like we want it too. So if there’s something you would like to see added to Excel, let us know in the comments. We’ll see what we can collectively do to make Excel even greater than it already is!
—Edit—
My pal Doug Glancy actually wrote a post on how to do this back in 2012, on my birthday no less. I’d clean forgotten about that post. So be sure to check out Doug’s implementation of this too.
About the author
Yep, that’s me all right. Jeff Weird. Excel Madman.
If you liked this post, then you’ll love my upcoming book: Excel for Superheroes and Evil Geniuses. Keep a lookout for it in early 2015, and check out my posts on this blog or over at Daily Dose of Excel to get a feel for what kinds of things I’ll be covering. The book will give users an excellent overview of how Excel works under the covers, and what tools the interface puts at their fingers right out of the box. And it will ship with free code that will add amazing new features and functionality to Excel. You’ll be an Excel Evil Genius in no time!
Stay tuned…
32 Responses to “Extract Numbers from Text using Excel VBA [Video]”
Interesting that you are posting this at the same time as Doug http://yoursumbuddy.com/regex-function-sum-numbers-string/
Looks like two different articles about two different subjects, extracting numbers in text vs. summing all the numbers in text. Also, articles are published 20 days apart. Is the interesting part that there were two articles written about Visual Basic techniques within this month?
Sorry, that should have said 1 day, not 20. Was looking at the wrong thing. I still think it's just a nice coincidences to have multiple articles about VB written. Dick Kusleika also routinely writes about VB at dailydoseofexcel.com
What a lucky coincidence. I know about Doug's blog, but havent had a chance to read it in a while. Thanks for sharing the link.
I think that the best lesson that can come from the several salary survey solutions is that one should have anticipated the variety of monetary units. If the survey utilized drop down currency lists and limited the salary field to whole numbers only, etc. the resulting input would have been far cleaner. Sorry, Chandoo, but the messy input was, in my opinion, self-inflicted.
You are right. Since there are more than 200 different currencies, I thought a currency field would complicate the survey. The bigger problem was, Google Docs (which I used for survey) does not have an option to capture only numbers. Input fields were by text, so people entered in lots of different formats.
But I am happy how it turned out. It taught me several lessons on how to clean data.
Next time I will use a better tool to capture such responses.
Your post made me check how the "regular" and "irregular" decimal separators look like in different countries and it appears to be really interesting case. Take a look:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark
Cheers.
I am pretty sure you can replace this code block from your article...
If Text Like "*.*,*" Then
european = True
Else
european = False
End If
with this single line of code...
european = Format$(0, ".") = ","
Just to follow up on my previous post, I think I may have misunderstood the intent of your code. You were not looking to see if the computer system was using a dot for the decimal point, rather, you were looking to see if the Text was using a dot as the decimal point, weren't you? If so, then you could use this single line of code as to replace your If..Then..Else block...
european = Text Like "*.*,*"
But what if the number in Text was not large enough to display a thousands separator? Or what if it were a whole number? In either of those cases your original test, and my replacement for it, will fail. Maybe this would be a better test...
european = Right(Format$(Text, "."), 1) = ","
You are right. I am checking if the text has European format. And I loved your one line shortcut. I did not think of using LIKE in such context. Thanks for sharing that.
Again, you are right that this method would fail if the number is not big enough for a thousands separator. Since my data has annual salaries, all numbers are usually in thousands. So I did not think about it.
Hi ,
I have a question please. I'm working on a report that has alphanumeric on it and I only need to retrieve 7 integers that starts with 7 and 3 example SCM RIS PX RIS 02 - 7152349, ADSF\243434134, CM532345 and i need to get the 7152349. Can you please help me on this? I truly appreciate your help!
Thank you very much!
Hi-
The post was wonderful. Please take a look at this function also
Function ExtractNumber(InputString As String) As String
'Function evaluates an input string character by character
' and returns numeric only characters
'Declare counter variable
Dim i As Integer
'Reset input variable
ExtractNumber = ""
'Begin iteration; repeat for the length of the input string
For i = 1 To Len(InputString)
'Test current character for number
If IsNumeric(Mid(InputString, i, 1)) Then
'If number is found, add it to the output string
ExtractNumber = ExtractNumber & Mid(InputString, i, 1)
End If
Next i
End Function
Thank you so much. Your function code is amazing. It very useful for my lesson. Thank you so much.
To be more international.
At the beginning, for the rench format :
If fromThis.Value Like "*.*,*" Or fromThis.Value Like "* *,*" Then
european = True
End If
And at the end :
ElseIf ltr = "," And european And Len(retVal) > 0 Then
retVal = retVal & Application.DecimalSeparator
End If
Hi Chandoo,
Sorry, but your code does not work correctly with my Hungarian excel. My decimal separator is "," so
getNumber = CDbl(retVal)
will not convert the string to value, because you hard-coded "." as separator.
And, as you mentioned: "method would fail if the number is not big enough for a thousands separator" I would like to add: would fail if the user did not enter the thousand separator and also would fail if the thousand separator is not "," nor "." but " " (space chr) - as in Hungary.
This two functions could help to determine the system settings:
application.DecimalSeparator
application.ThousandsSeparator
Conclusion:
you say: "We do not need special treatment for regular format (61,000.30) as Excel & VBA are capable of dealing with these numbers by default." - it is true in case you system uses the regular format. 🙂
Cheers,
Kris
Awesome! It works !!
But how does one take into account negative numbers (say the list has negative numbers and I want to retain those negative numbers)
Thanks.
Hi. When I download this example, my excel is not showing formulas exactly. I wanted a ready version of this example, please. Thank you
Hi Chandoo,
Thanks for this brilliant article like many others that you have written for the benefit of many. Unfortunately, I am constantly having problems downloading your sample workbooks. I am currently using Excel 2007, and each time I try to download any of your sample workbooks, for e.g. the 'Extract Numbers Using VBA workbook', I get the following message 'This file is not in a recognizable format'.
I always get this message each time I try to download any of your sample workbooks. Please kindly advise me on how to resolve this.
Thank you.
Kenny
I have numbers like 12345-12-1 which I want to extract from text strings. 12345 might be variable there as 123, 1234, 12345, 123456,1234567 or so. When I get that in other cell (Column) I should see multiple entries of similar numbers with - (hyphen). How to do that?
@Madhav
Assuming your data is in cell A1
=LEFT(A1,FIND("-",A1)-1)
Thanks Hui for your response. Thank you for your time to find potential solution for my problem.
I tried your formula but was not successful in using the same.
here is more clarification so that you/others could help me.
Column A has following in Cells A1 to A4.. could be long..
ABCD 12345-12-1 XYZ 9878-02-9
LMNOPQ 12345-12-1 STQ 789748-98-5
NFHFKDJFKDS 123-23-1, NDKANSD
A FDSAFNDS 12345-12-1, ASNDSAND
from such data I need to extract the number with hyphens
remove , immediately after the numbers, separate the numbers with spaces
Column B shall look like:
12345-12-1 9878-02-9
12345-12-1 789748-98-5
123-23-1
2345-12-1
2 separate strings (numbers) having hyphen (-) therein should be separated with space.
@Madhev
Have a look at a solution using a simple UDF
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zexf4t9tmxmt3m9/Get_Numbers.xlsm?dl=1
Thanks Hui that worked well with the examples I provided.
I should have given following type of example:
2-ABCD 12345-12-1 X-2-YZ 9878-02-9
in the above case I do not want to extract a number and hyphen which is connected to or is part of text string..
Can you please help me modify the code to ignore numbers and - with text string.?
Thanks in advance.
@Madhav
So what is the answer expected from
2-ABCD 12345-12-1 X-2-YZ 9878-02-9
Thanks for your interest and time Hui.
so when I have text like
2-ABCD 12345-12-1 X-2-YZ 9878-02-9 3-abc-4-efg in Cell A2
in B2 the answer should be only numbers with hyphens and no text with numbers or hyphens
12345-12-1 9878-02-9 OR
12345-12-1 some delimiter (, or 😉 9878-02-9
The logic I thought was (but unable to do)
1. remove all strings containing text (and - and numbers) and then extract only numbers containing hyphens
2. Extract numbers in only following format ( # is a digit below) and ignore numbers and hyphens in any other format
#######-##-#
######-##-#
#####-##-#
####-##-#
###-##-#
##-##-#
Hope this helps.
Why not just use the function =getNumber ?
=getnumber doesn't extract numbers with hyphens..
also need to ignore numbers and hyphens associated with text string
When I use this code that code give me error
cdb1 is not highlight can u explain me
@Deepak
It runs fine for me
Select the first line and Press F9 to set a stop point
goto a cell and edit the function and press Enter
Then you can step through the code when it runs using F8
report back what happens
HI,
How can we add spaces between numbers and removing decimals.
how can we make spaces in the reesult e.g 25 655 2335
Dear Team,
I need to extract number (cheque number) from a cell (some numbers may repeat that to be ignored),
Text is - :-Inward Clg Cheque 00992924 00992924,BD
Result should be - 992924
Kindly help in getting formula for this (please email the code or VBA Code)