Sanjay, my colleague is an avid programmer and excel enthusiast. In his spare time he wrote a small VBA macro to solve Sudoku. Sudoku is a very famous number based puzzle with a 9×9 grid of cells. Each of the 9 rows, columns and 3×3 blocks should be filled in such a way that they have all the numbers from 1 to 9. Sudoku is a very effective way to keep your brain cells ticking. I am a huge sudoku fan and I solve sudoku whenever I have few minutes to kill. So naturally I jumped with joy when I saw Sanjay’s excel macro for solving sudoku. He is kind enough to let me share this with all of you.
Click here to download the sudoku solver workbook. It has macros, so enable them when you download the file.
The file is unlocked, so if you are curious, go around and poke the code.
And if you are interested in writing your own sudoku solver, here is a basic algorithm:
- While Sudoku is not solved,
- Check if any row, column or 3×3 block has ‘n’ cells such that, (n>1)
- All possible values in those ‘n’ cells are exactly ‘n’ unique values
- For each block of such cells,
- Remove the occurrences of the ‘n’ unique values from remaining cell’s possible’s list in that row / column / 3×3 grid
- Check if any cell has more than one possible value. If so, Sudoku is not solved.
- Check if any row, column or 3×3 block has ‘n’ cells such that, (n>1)
- Do While
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