Why do we make dashboards? To me the reason would be “to provide all the necessary information at a glance so that you can make a decision (or just get a feel)”
I think the traditional dashboards are overloaded with lots of information (and sometimes data) and often take more time to interpret. This means less time for decision making.
With that backdrop, I would like to propose a simple alternative to executive dashboards
Tweetboard
What in the name of 13 sliced pie chart is a tweetboard?
Imagine a dashboard with out charts, but with 6 to 8 sentences, each less than 140 characters, explaining the data / trends concisely. That, my dear bird, is a tweetboard.
Take a look at an example tweetboard of monthly performance and you will know what it is:
Why I think tweetboard is an alternative to dashboard?
Because with tweetboard, your focus will be on reading the sentence and figuring out what to do with your business, not on making sense of 3 bars going up and 2 going down.
How to make a tweetboard?
Simple, Download the tweetboard excel template. Now go process your data, identify the messages you want to show in the dashboard. Go type them in the tweetboard template. Take a deep breath and go tell your story to the world.
Let us discuss:
What do you think? Would you replace a dashboard with tweetboard? Do you think it can stir up a decision maker towards action.
PS: I got the idea of tweetboard while reading Juice’s article on whether dashboards should be limited to one page.
PPS: The dashboard image is from accounting web.
PPPS: This is the first post with 2 3 PSs. 😛
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