When you are a “work from home” dad, you can see a lot of patterns. Here is one.
My kids come home from school by noon (they are too young for full day school). Right after lunch they watch their favorite cartoon program, Team Umizoomi, in which few fictional characters go about solving problems in the Umi city using maths. Milli, one of the characters is an expert with patterns. She solves problems by identifying patterns and unleashing pattern power.
Here is a fun example of the pattern power. (It has Chef Gordan Ramsey too, which is sweet)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JTxJiCQEMc
Team Umizoomi & Excel Fill – How do they link up?
Here is how they link up.
Imagine you have a workbook where you need to follow a pattern, like one of these:
You too can unleash the pattern power. What more… you needn’t break in to a song sequence every-time you unleash the power.
How to use Excel’s pattern fill?
Here is an example. Let’s say you want 2 different formulas & 1 blank cells in a sequence.
- Write the first formula in cell 1
- Second formula in cell 2
- Leave the 3rd cell blank
- Select all 3 cells
- Drag to fill
See the screencast aside to understand this concept.
Bonus tip: You can use this technique horizontally too.
Where to use this pattern power?
Here are few uses for pattern fills:
- Dashboards & reports where you need to show some information but space it with blanks for readability
- Apply different formatting to different rows / columns
- Set conditional formatting only to every nth cell
- Format (or write formulas for) weekdays & weekends differently
I use pattern power often when designing dashboards or complex reports.
What about you?
Do you use pattern power? Tell us in the comments where you would use them.
I must go now, I hear the umi alarm. Looks like the kids are back from school.
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