Excel Outside the Box: Unbelieveable Excel Techniques from Excel MVP Bob Umlas

By Bob Umlas

Designed with the Excel guru in mind, this handbook introduces advanced and creative solutions, and hacks to the software's most challenging problems. Through a series of more than 50 techniques, tables, formulas, and charts, this guide details processes that may be used in any Excel application, across all disciplines. Creative approaches for building formulas within formulas, pivot tables, conditional formatting, and mastering array formulas are just some of the numerous challenges explained. Other higher level solutions discussed include using VBA macro code to override cell calculations, solve for sums from a text string, and trimming and cleaning all cells on a worksheet. This is the all-encompassing resource for advanced users of Excel wanting to learn more techniques to broaden and empower their use of Excel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Holy Macro Books
• Release date: Apr 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781615473038

Book preview

Introduction

There are many Excel books out there, why did I write this one? My daily work involves writing custom applications using Excel, and there are many problems I’ve had to think through to come up with a solution in Excel. I’ve used these solutions many times in my applications. I have not found any books or articles which described similar issues and solutions, yet it is hard to imagine that Excel developers in other companies hadn’t also come up against these issues. So, given the feedback from my previous book (This isn’t Excel, it’s Magic), I thought it was time for another book to help the already-advanced Excel developer get past these hurdles.

So many times I’ve seen a data validation list contain many blanks at the bottom of the list (which was fixed in Excel 2010!), or with gaps, like this:

OTB001507.jpg

when it should look like this:

OTB001508.jpg

Even if the source contains those gaps. I describe how to fix that (and so many more things) in this book.

I show a lot of involved formulas but I decipher them step by step so they’re no longer so formidable, like this array-entered one, for example:

=INDEX(A:A,SMALL(IF(ISNA(MATCH($A$1:$A$12,$C$1:$C$9,0)),ROW($1:$12),),ROW(A2)))

This book is aimed at the company’s already-expert Exceller, elevating him/her to the next level.

–Bob Umlas

Chapter 1 - Techniques

1-A Dilemma with Relative References

Figure 1 and Figure 2 show a simple worksheet normally and with formulas showing:

OOB0001.tif

Figure 1

OOB0002.tif

Figure 2

Assume this goes on for hundreds of rows.

Also assume you discovered that most of the formulas are wrong – you really wanted those cells which refer to Data to be 3 rows down. That is, in cell D1 you wanted the reference to be to cell M20, not M17. How can you fix it? There’s nothing to replace – replacing 17 with 20 certainly won’t help. You can’t fix the first one and fill down because of the cells which are not of a like formula – for example, filling down would destroy the formula in cell D4. Figure 3 is what you want, how can you get there?

OOB0003.tif

Figure 3

The answer (well, one answer, anyway) is to switch to R1C1 format. Yes, it actually does have a really good use! It’s done here in the File menu, Options.

OOB0004.tif

Figure 4

How does that help? Look at the underlying formulas here:

OOB0006.tif

Figure 5

See those [16]’s? All you need to do is change them to [19]’s, with the result shown below:

OOB0007.tif

Figure 6

When you switch back to A1 notation (uncheck R1C1) you have this:

OOB0008.tif

Figure 7

And you’re done! But wait – here’s an entirely different approach which also works well. First, create a new sheet, say that’s Sheet4. It will remain empty for this process, but will serve an important function as you will soon see. Change the above formulas by changing the reference from Data to Sheet4, as seen here:

OOB0009.tif

Figure 8

And afterwards as you see here:

OOB0010.tif

Figure 9

Now go to Sheet4, select cells M1:M3, Insert cells (Home tab), shifting down:

OOB0011.tif

Figure 10

Return to the main sheet and look at the formulas:

OOB0012.tif

Figure 11

Now change Sheet4 back to Data and you’re done:

OOB0013.tif

Figure 12

2-Build a Formula with a Formula

Look at the worksheet in Figure 13 on the next page.

You can see that some information from Sheet2 is being picked up on Sheet1 via an INDIRECT formula. A quick look at Sheet2 (nothing special) in Figure 14.

Why use INDIRECT? Perhaps the information on Sheet2 may be cut/pasted elsewhere, but you are interested in the data in A1:A22, regardless of how information may be moved around.

What’s the issue? Look at the formulas in Sheet1 in Figure 15.

The problem is, how can you create these formulas without typing each one (or without reverting to creating a VBA procedure!)? You can’t fill the formula down from A1, because it’s all text, and the formula will stay the same. The answer lies in building the formula with a formula. Let’s see what this means (Figure 16).

Notice that the formulas in column A seem to be the same as the previous screenshot, but look at what’s in the formula bar! You are looking at ==INDIRECT(Sheet2!A&ROW(A1)&) which is the formula you want to be in cell A1, but entirely built as a string except the reference to ROW(A1) to give us the one you want.

OOB0014.tif

Figure 13

OOB0015.tif

Figure 14

OOB0016.tif

Figure 15

OOB0017.tif

Figure 16

OOB0018.tif

Figure 17

becomes

OOB0019.tif

Figure 18

and then

OOB0020.tif

Figure 19

becomes

OOB0021.tif

Figure 20

This becomes what you see in cell A1. Now when this formula is filled down, the ROW(A1) becomes ROW(A2), etc. and you have what you need. However, this is not ready for use – it’s not an INDIRECT formula, it’s a text string containing the word INDIRECT, etc. What’s left to do is copy/paste special values. I like doing it this way especially since after the fill down, my hand is on the mouse.

Right-click the border of the selection and drag away (anywhere), and then drag the selection right back to where it started. This is what you see when you right-click drag the border away without letting go of the mouse:

OOB0022.tif

Figure 21

When you drag back, before letting go you see Figure 22:

OOB0023.tif

Figure 22

When you let go you’ll see this:

OOB0024.tif

Figure 23

And the highlighted option is the feature you use to get this:

OOB0025.tif

Figure 24

It doesn’t look like anything changed, but look at the formula bar – it’s no longer a text string. However, the formulas in column A need to be coerced into formulas. This can be easily done by replacing = with =. Replacing = with =