Category Archives: Uncategorized
Excel questions at the Financial Modelling Summit 2022
Slugify text We want to slugify text, ie include only characters a-z, 0-9 and “-“, so that it can become part of an URL. So that for example “Why I say ‘Bazinga!” – my #1 Reason for Using =INDEX(MATCH())!!” Becomes … Continue reading
Excel for Mac, VBA OnKey macros, and MacOS Monterey
You know that feeling when a manufacturer pulls the rug from under you? When a feature (OK, a workaround, even a hack) you’ve been relying on for years suddenly stops working because of an “upgrade”? Welcome to the world of … Continue reading
XLTest 1.74 spreadsheet audit addin
I have released an update to my XLTest Excel add-in for spreadsheet auditing, visualisation, and testing. Changes up to version 1.74 (September 2021) Start Session dialog changed to show internal workbook information before opening, and to open in manual calculation … Continue reading
Power Query infer data types with Table.Profile
The Power Query UI automatically detects column data types and performs the transformations for you. Typically these steps look like this: However, when I am calling Power Query M code from VBA ( see my previous posts) to open any … Continue reading
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
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
Patrick O'Beirne @ sysmod 