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TIP: How to Find or Replace New Lines in Cells

Märt Parker — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 12:37:50 +0000

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.

Timesaving macro concatenates cell values

Märt Parker — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 15:55:43 +0000

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.

Pivot Table Tip: Color All One Type of Data Items at Once

Märt Parker — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 08:12:05 +0000

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. 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:

Fill Gaps Based on Cells Above

Märt Parker — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:07:57 +0000

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.

As an example – the left table below is not suitable to use in data analysis – you can’t even filter rows by ‘Category’ if you would like to:

Convert to >>

Fortunatelly, there is an elegant time-saving solution to do this automatically. The logic behind the solution is that you can use the Excel command to select only empty cells and then change them all at once.

The steps are the following:

Choose the area (column) you need to fill – the first column in our example
Press Ctrl+G or choose from the menu Edit > Go To…
Select ‘Blanks’ and click OK. The empty cells of the first column should now be selected.
Write formula – type equation sign (=) and press UP arrow. By doing this, every selected cell gets the value directly above.
Press Ctrl+Enter. Holding Ctrl tells Excel to change all the active cells at once.
One more thing – you’ll have to convert the formulas to static values to quarantee that the values will stay the same even after sorting and other transformations. Use ‘Copy’ and Paste Special -> Values. Now you’re done.