Assign a keyboard shortcut to the macro and it will significantly improve work speed.

Sub PasteVal()

    Selection.PasteSpecial Paste:=xlValues

End Sub

The same technique is usable for changing certain characters into new lines (inserting newlines instead of comas or semicolons e.g.).

Newlines are created in Excel while typing in the cell and pressing ALT+Enter.

Case: the spreadsheet contains manually entered and badly structured data. You need to paste together the data from various cells, but you can’t do it with formulas because every situation is slightly different (contains different number of rows e.g.). Basically, you need a tool that takes the contents of currently selected cells, concatenates the values and pastes the outcome somewhere.

Problem and the desired outcome is depicted on the following screenshot.

As a solution, you can use a simple macro that takes the contents of the selection, concatenates it using newlines between values and pastes the outcome to the first selected cell. The code that does this is on the following screenshot. It uses Selection.Cells property that refers to the currently selected range of cells.

• formula bar in Excel 2008 is disturbing. On laptop screen it gets lost behind other windows. 2004 version was better.
• no Data Analysis pack
• no VBA macro support

Excel 2008 for Mac flaws and problems vol 1

I’ll collect here my findings of the serious problems I’ve found, bit by bit.

Switching Between Displaying Cell Value and Formula

Today I struggled hard because in Excel 2008 there is no easy way to switch between the value and formula display mode. You’ll have to go to Excel preferences and change it under the ‘View’ tab each time. And if you want to change it back, you’ll go there again. Very uncomfortable, if you want to switch between formula and value displays quickly.

Using Pivot tables is also quite disturbing and it’s easy to get lost. More about it next time.

I have a little tip for those of you who face the same problem – you can still attach different color to different Pivot table items. It is possible to use custom formatting to define the color of the Pivot table data item. This way all data of the same kind will be formatted with the same font color – resistant to table refreshes, size changes and field arrangements. And most importantly – you can change the color instantly from one place.

Field format is applied by right-clicking on the field name: Field settings -> Number

Then you should apply ‘Custom’ number formatting and define color format as shown on the screenshot below. This makes the text blue:

Below is a table of milk production data. One data item is made blue to distinguish it from the rest of the table:

Example:

The last red number seems incorrect, because 12,8 + 12,8 = 25,6

Usually this is OK, as from the source data point of view, this is mathematically correct.  But on some rare cases you want to add up numbers as they are displayed and you want the result to be 25,6. To let Excel do the math at the displayed precision level go to:

On Excel 2007: Excel Options > Advanced, scroll down to When calculating this workbook

On Excel Mac 2008: Excel -> Preferences -> Calculation

And check the field ‘Set precision as displayed‘

This should be used with caution as Excel changes the numbers in cells permanently.

Below is a statistical table from Eurostat that is tuned with in-cell graphics.

Tip 1: You can apply calculations to second parameter to fit the result into desired space (in this case, the numerical value is divided by 10)

Tip 2: Try experimenting with different characters for the repetition, like “-”, “o” as the first parameter for the function. You can also apply some other character at the end of the formula with “&”+[end character]

Excel in-cell graphics for improved readability

What to do when you need to have a Pivot table which can be used for Excel 2003 and 2007 users at the same time? The only solution I know is to first create a Pivot table in Excel 2003. After that you can edit the Pivot in 2007, save modifications and it still works in both versions of Excel. So it is useful to have an older version of Excel available besides 2007.

Subtotal() function is one of the features that can help you to organize the spreadsheets better and prevent messy calculation logics. Novice Excel users often use SUM() function in places where SUBTOTAL() would be more appropriate. For large tables this practice can produce unmanagable files and hard to find calculation errors.

SUBTOTAL is meant to calculate subtotals or summary rows in the middle of the data table. The important distinction between Subtotal and Sum is that Subtotal does not sum cells which contain another use of Subtotal. This prevents multiple sums.

Bad practice		Better solution
		*Subtotals of categories are calculated with SUBTOTAL as well

Using Subtotal instead of Sum() in formulas has the advantage, if you need to calculate over large number of subtotals and the table is long.

Be careful – if somebody else modifies the table and accidentally adds a row with SUM() function into the range that you sum with subtotal, then the result will be wrong.