Author Archives: Patrick O'Beirne, Excel/VBA developer
Excel Virtually Global 2021
I am one of the 48 speakers at a 48-hour Excel extravaganza online on Oct 12 and 13. It’s FREE but you are encouraged to make a donation to charity to reflect the value to you of the content you … Continue reading
Event Tracing is three times faster than OutputDebugString
I use the OutputDebugString API in Windows to send debugging messages without the line limitations of the VBA Immediate Window. This is also useful when tracing the causes of crashes which kill the Excel process. I use TraceSpy to capture … Continue reading
VBA Performance Profiler : timing procedure execution
This is an update and replacement for the post on 9th March 2017 titled ‘Free add in to profile VBA speed and coverage’. Updated 8-Jul-2021 with an example profile report. Download XLTEST_VBA_Profiler.xlam. (Updated 22-Jul-2021: Tracing P_.O also sends to OutputDebugString … Continue reading
Querying Text/CSV files in VBA, method #3: Power Query
The module PowerQueryText.bas contains VBA code to query text/csv/tab delimited files and return tables to worksheets. Continue reading
Querying Text/CSV files. Method #2: ADO Recordset
The module ADOQueryText.bas has the functions to read a delimited text file into a worksheet. It uses an ADODB recordset to perform the query. Continue reading
Querying Text/CSV files. Method #1: Querytable
The legacy Get Data from Text/CSV command in Excel creates a Querytable. This is pretty good for most purposes, except… Continue reading
Reading Unicode file contents as text
This is a short update on my post of Sep 28, 2020 on reading Unicode text in VBA. I am reposting the module as ADOStream.bas Continue reading
Hello (the rest of the) World – reading data in other languages
Have you ever opened a text file in Excel and found that the characters looked weird or corrupted? The Wikipedia entry for mojibake says ‘In German, Buchstabensalat (“letter salad”) is a common term for this phenomenon, and in Spanish, deformación … Continue reading
UK Covid-19 Track & Trace Excel snafu: Uncontrolled spreadsheets lead to data loss
The story broke around October 5th that Public Health England temporarily lost 16,000 Covid test results because they did not notice that the XLS data format they were using was insufficient to process the number of results they were getting. … Continue reading
Nested JSON to flat data tables
Have you ever had to convert a file of JSON text to Excel tables? Not simple JSON, but one with a collection of dictionaries inside a dictionary inside a collection of dictionary records inside another collection of records inside a … Continue reading
