This article is part of our VBA Crash Course. Please read the rest of the articles in this series by clicking below links.
- What is VBA & Writing your First VBA Macro in Excel
- Understanding Variables, Conditions & Loops in VBA
- Using Cells, Ranges & Other Objects in your Macros
- Putting it all together – Your First VBA Application using Excel
- My Top 10 Tips for Mastering VBA & Excel Macros
In part 3 of our VBA Crash Course, we are going to learn how to speak with various Excel objects like Cells, Ranges etc. and deal with them.
Objects – what are they?
Any thing and everything is an object. Your dog, your bed, your neighbors cat, their car, your bike, your computer, the shiny new Excel workbook you just created, my website, your email account – every thing is an object. For that matter, Lady Gaga’s meat dress is an object too. But that is a whole different subject.
From our “We are nuts” example yesterday, you can already see these objects:
- One awesome owner (that is you)
- 24 store manager objects
- 24 store objects
Some sample objects you can find in Excel workbooks
- Cells, lots of them
- Ranges of cells
- Worksheets
- Charts
- Pivot Tables
- The entire workbook
Objects & Excel VBA
Since your Excel workbook is nothing but a collection of objects, whenever you want to make any change (like modify a cell’s value or recolor a chart), you need to refer to the corresponding object and do the necessary thing.
But how do we talk to these objects from VBA. Well, to know that, you must understand how an Object looks to our eyes vis-a-vis computer’s eyes. Here is an illustration to help you understand the difference.
As you can guess, Objects have Properties. In the case above, color RED is a property of the cell object.
Objects – What are they made of?
In VBA world, objects are made of 2 things – properties & methods.
The color of a cell is a property.
You use copy method to copy cell’s value to Excel’s clipboard.
In other words, properties are what an object has. Methods are operations you do on the object.
Note: Certain objects also have a special class of methods called as Events. An Event is a special type of method that runs only when a circumstance is met. For example, select a cell, Excel internally runs SelectionChange Event on the current worksheet.
How do we access these properties & methods?
In plain English, if you want to know the color of a cell, you would ask “What is the color of cell A4?”
In Excel VBA language, the same becomes Range(“A4”).Interior.Color
Notice how the dot (.) is used like of in our plain English version.
Dot (.) is your best friend when dealing with objects. Since many Excel objects have dozens of properties and methods associated with them, to help us understand and use right properties, VBE (Visual Basic Editor) shows all the properties and methods whenever you press . after typing an object, like this:
Most commonly used Objects in VBA:
While there are no single set of objects that are used by everyone for every need, there are a few VBA objects that are used in many situations. In this section, we will examine these objects.
Range Object:
Range object is used to refer to a range of cells. For example Range(“A1:A10”) refers to the cells A1:A10 in the current worksheet. Range has a lot of useful methods and properties. One of the commonly used property is is Range(“A1:A10”).cells which refers to all the cells in the range.
Tips on using range object:
- You can use named ranges in Range object like this: Range(“myStoreList”)
- You can use square brackets [] to refer to ranges like this: [A10] refers to Range(“A10”)
- You can use variables in Range Object like this: Range(mylist) refers to whatever address is stored in mylist variable.
- You can use variables along with static text, like this: Range(“A1:A” & endPoint) refers to the range A1:A120, assuming endPoint variable is 120.
ActiveCell Object:
Active cell object refers to the currently selected cell. If you have selected a range of cells, usually ActiveCell refers to the top-left cell.
Tips on using ActiveCell Object:
- Use ActiveCell.End(xlDown).Activate to select the last cell in the same row with a value (assumes you have no breaks in between). You can also use options like xlToLeft, xlToRight, xlUp too.
Selection Object:
Selection object refers to the currently selected cells or anything else that is selected (like a chart or drawing shape).
How to learn about various Excel Objects and use them:
Excel has a lot of objects. Some times objects contain other objects. For example a Range contains some Cells. A Selection may contain some Charts. Understanding the hierarchy and properties of all these objects is a tough task. But thankfully, there is help.
Here are my top tips to learn about various Excel Objects:
- Use Macro Recorder: Whenever you need to use an object that you are not familiar with, just use built-in macro recorder and do some operations on that object. Now stop it and view the code. You would have a good idea how to deal with that object. For ex. if you want to learn how to use VBA to refresh a pivot table, just start recorder, select the pivot, refresh it and stop the recorder. Now go and see the code and you will have a good idea how to refresh pivot tables from VBA.
- Use VBA Help: Excel VBA has a very good help system. Just go to Visual Basic Editor (ALT+F11) and press F1 to start the help. Type the object name you want help on and read thru the pages to learn. VBE also has a helpful screen called “Object Browser” to visually browse various Excel objects and understand the methods & properties.
- Learn from Code Examples: There are several sites, including Chandoo.org that publish frequent articles, code samples and tips on Excel & VBA. Follow a handful of these sites and learn from the shared examples.
- Take up some project: In your day to day work, you always see some problems that can be solved with VBA. So go ahead and take up one such task and try to do it using VBA. This is a great way to learn a new language like VBA.
- Join a Training Program: Last but not least, joining a training program is a good way to learn VBA. If you want a good program on VBA, consider joining our upcoming batch of VBA Classes.
Putting it all together – a Daily Sales Tracker for “We Are Nuts”:
So far you have learned What is Excel VBA, How to use variables, conditions & loops and How to use various Excel Objects.
In the next part, learn how to create a VBA Application combining all the things you learned so far.
What are your tips for learning about Excel Objects & Using Them?
Excel Object Model is vast and deep. There are a lot of things that we can learn (and remember), but there are a lot more that we will never know or memorize until we need to use them. I always rely on built-in macro recorder to learn about the objects and then modify the code until it works just right.
What about you? How do you learn about Excel Objects? Please share your tips & ideas using comments.
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23 Responses to “Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA”
Its possible to display up to 4 text values.
Have a look at the screen shot of an example that I had posted way back at the EHA and figure out how its done !
http://tinypic.com/r/muzywk/6
With Excel 2010 you can use Conditional Formatting to apply custom number formats which can display text. (In older versions you can only modify text color and cell background color, but not number formats.) Using CF allows for an even larger number of different display values.
[...] Display text values in Pivot Tables without VBA [...]
Hey,
Thanks, this helps. But how do you do it for multiple values where there is a huge amount of non repeating text?
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn't a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn’t a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
[...] Pivot Tables take tables of data and allow the user to summarise and consolidate the data at the same time. This is a great and very fast method of analysis but is restricted to handling mathematical functions on the value field resulting in numerical summaries. – read more [...]
[…] Read more here: Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA […]
There is a very good way actually for handling text inside values area.
First you create a special column on the very left side and call it ID, and put unique ID (numbers only), and then create a pivot table with:
Row Labels and Column labels as you like, and in the Values labels use the unique ID number.
Move the unique ID number (copy paste) somewhere to the right and use vlookup to load the data you need using the ID as reference.
It is a bit longer way but for me it works perfectly to combine values as you like in any moment.
hope helps.
Regards,
Jon
Thank you! I finally understand pivot tables thanks to your clear, concise explanations and examples.
Good Day. This is exactly what i have been looking for. However when i try it on my pivot table or even when i try to recreate this exercise using the sample worksheet, i get this error:
"Microsoft Excel cannot use the number format you typed. Try using one of the built-in number formats."
Same thing here, Excel quite did not like the format in my PowerPivot. Any clues as to what may be going on? Thanks.
I have the same thing happening on my end. I'm running a normal pivot table on a .xlsm file.
@Danzi
What format did you use?
can you post the file ?
pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
NAME PAN AMOUNT
MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
MR.Y AAABR1258C
MR.A CFVDE2458T
MR.Z AAVCR12548C
MR.X AAAAC1254T
MR.Z AADCD245T
pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
NAME PAN AMOUNT
MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
MR.Y AAABR1258C 1000
MR.A CFVDE2458T 2000
MR.Z AAVCR12548C 5451
MR.X AAAAC1254T 45564
MR.Z AADCD245T 4500
how to get pivot tabe so i get PAN no. against Name.
I found an easy way to get text values in pivot table.
I create an other worksheet in wich each cell has a formula that copy the pivot table. The trick is that the formula does a lookup for the numbers in the pivot table.
The formula looks like that:
=IF(ISNUMBER(table!A1);VLOOKUP(table!A1;Code!$A$1:$B$65;2);IF(ISBLANK(table!A1);" ";table!A1))
Code is a worksheet where there is a liste of text /numbers correspondance.
As a bonus The new sheet is easier to format
Additional trick:
In my case, i encoded differents codeid with a power(2, codeId-1) so that summing then is equivalent to concatenate them.
1-A
2-B
4-C
8-D
yields :
5 - AC
14 - BCD
Hi
I want to ask if pivot can display dates in pivot field. As in a column i have customers and in row different items i want to know there last purchase date. anyone help in this??
Hello Guys, Need your help
I am doing some analysis of the cycle time of the product i.e how much time a product takes from manufacturing to the central warehouse.
I have batch numbers for the product and against them i have to pull out the diff. dates
Like the base date is from where the manufacturing start. So i have the batch number,against it's manuf. date. Now i have to pull out the date when it was quality released.
I have the quality released data but the data have duplicates, like i will have two dates or may be three for the same batch. So my main objective is to pull out the date which is latest among them.
BATCH NO. DATE of Mfg. DATE of Quality release
A1 12/4/2014 (HERE I HAVE TO PULL value)
Next Sheet
BATCH NO. DATE of Quality Release
A1 14/5/2014
a2 23/5/2016
A1 12/5/2014
A1 13/6/2014
From this sheet i have to pull up the latest date format of date here is dd/mm/yyy
TIA
[…] needed to present text instead of counts in a pivot table value column. Here is an excellent resource for Excel manipulation, in addition to an overview of pivot […]
This is great thank you.
Wow!!! Excellent!! It helped me a lot.
I am developing training tracking sheet for 200 employees with training completed date. Each employee will be attending 25 courses. How to indicate actual dates in pivot table value field.