Using ASCII codes it is possible to find or replace invisible characters like newlines in Excel worksheet. E.g. when needed to find newlines and replace them with something else, you can use ALT+010 in the search field.
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.
Excel
time saving
While working with spreadsheet data, it’s common to face situations where you have to manually reorder or transform data. Macros are of good help then. I’ll share an example of a quite common case where simple macro can help save a lot of time.
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.
Excel
macros, time saving
Microsoft Excel’s styling capabilities have improved over the time. But there are still lackings on some areas. One thing I personally miss is the ability to attach styles to Pivot table items. For example you have in one table the sums of revenues and sums of quantities – and you wish the revenues to be formatted differently. Of course, you can manually change the formatting of each revenue cell, but this is not a very modern way to handle it – considering we use styles for such formatting tasks in MS Office and other programs nowadays.
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. Read more…
Excel
cell format, data visualization, Pivot table, time saving
What will you do, if you have an output from a Pivot table and you need to use it as a source for another pivot table? Or you simply have gaps in the table that you need to fill with information above (or some other side). Not knowing the right approach might leave you the only option to change the cells manually – which would be a terrible waste of time for larger tables. Read more…
Excel
time saving
