In our excel paste tricks post, I have mentioned a paste special feature called “skip blanks” that can apparently be used to skip blank cells when pasting data. I am writing about this again because, I have received an email from Bruce saying,
This is erroneous. In actuality, the result that is pasted is the same size as what was copied, only in those cell references that were copied that happened to be blank, the destination cell references aren’t “written over”
and he is correct, I am wrong. I am sorry for this mistake. For some reason I didn’t test this tip while writing, I some how thought excel skips blank cells while pasting and shared the tip with you all. My mistake and thanks alot to Bruce for teaching me this tip in the correct way. I test all the tips posted here on at least one version of excel, this was an exception, I am hoping it will not be repeated.
Just in case you want to skip blank cells, here is a work around.
Apply data filters on the range from which you want to remove blanks, filter by non-blank cells and select it. Press ctrl+c and paste it wherever you want. Excel pastes only cells matching the filter criteria (thus skipping blanks)
PS: I have corrected the post too. The e-book will be corrected later on.
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