Category Archives: Uncategorized
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
VBA Read Unicode file contents in various encodings
To read a text file, you need to be able to handle more character sets than just ANSI. Not just in the contents but also in the file and folder names.The classic article on this is by Joel Spolsky:https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/ Here … Continue reading
A look back to Eusprig 2019
The 20th conference of the European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group was held in Browns of Covent Garden, London on 11-12 July 2019, Thursday 11 July 2019 Developing Excel Thought Leadership David Lyford-Smith, ICAEW, Chartered Accountants’ Hall This described the development … Continue reading
Extend Excel: London 18 Oct
Charles Williams is organising a conference in London on October 18th, 2018. I’ll be there! This is a rare chance to meet leading developers from all over the world and hear directly from MS on Excel Extensibility. Expect to be … Continue reading
Excel and PowerPoint 2016 for Mac gripes
I’ve been trying to maintain compatibility between Mac and Windows versions of Excel/VBA apps for a while now, and it’s a pain. These notes refer to versions 16.14 of both Excel and Powerpoint. Here are some of my recent threads … Continue reading
Dublin Tech Summit 18-19 Apr 2018
#DTS18 @dubtechsummit Dublin Tech Summit is a two day (Wed 18 and Thu 19 April 2018) meetup of startups and business people intended to connect investors to tech companies, and to highlight emerging tech trends. I attended as a guest … Continue reading
Tracing & Profiling VBA speed with TraceSpy
I’m interested in measuring VBA performance. I add tracing calls to the routines so I get the time on entrance and exit. I also optionally add a call to trace every line executed, which I use when I get unexpected … Continue reading
Rubberduck VBA addin
The Rubberduck VBA (@rubberduckvba) open source project has been going for a couple of years, and when I was reminded of it recently I decided to give it a try. It’s definitely a help in VBA development and I’ll go on … Continue reading
Conditional compilation VBA Excel Mac/Win/32/64…
To make my addin handle all the combinations of Excel 2007 onwards on Mac and Windows, 32-bit and 64-bit, I ended up with this conditional compilation block. The example I use is GetTickCount() but the principle applies to other declarations. Microsoft … Continue reading
