Stacked bar(column) charts are a popular way to depict 2 more series of related data, like sales of 2 products.
But there are several ways to stack the bars in a bar chart. Here is a list of 6 ways to stack them
1. One on top of another
Advantages: Easy to create, takes less space
Drawbacks: Hard to compare, only first value starts at zero
2. Separated
Advantages: Easy to read and compare
Drawbacks: takes more space, needs extra calculation for the gap series
3. Mirrored:
Advantages: looks fancy and takes less space, good for large data sets
Drawbacks: needs extra calculation
4. Partially Overlapped
Advantages: Easy to compare, Easy to make
Drawbacks: One series dominates another, good where domination is needed (like this vs. last year)
5. Completely Overlapped
Advantages: easy to compare
Drawbacks: Needs extra formatting, not always produces good results
6. Hanged from Top and Bottom
Advantages: none
Drawbacks: difficult to compare, needs extra formula to calculate gap series
I like 2 and 5 and use them whenever I can.
What about you? How do you like your bars?
PS: for the purpose of discussion neglect other important chart elemets like labels, colors etc.
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