Book Image

Exploring Microsoft Excel’s Hidden Treasures

By : David Ringstrom
Book Image

Exploring Microsoft Excel’s Hidden Treasures

By: David Ringstrom

Overview of this book

David Ringstrom coined the phrase “Either you work Excel, or it works you!” after observing how many users carry out tasks inefficiently. In this book, you’ll learn how to get more done with less effort. This book will enable you to create resilient spreadsheets that are easy for others to use as well, while incorporating spreadsheet disaster preparedness techniques. The time-saving techniques covered in the book include creating custom shortcuts and icons to streamline repetitive tasks, as well as automating them with features such as Tables and Custom Views. You’ll see how Conditional Formatting enables you to apply colors, Cell icons, and other formatting on-demand as your data changes. You’ll be empowered to protect the integrity of spreadsheets and increase usability by implementing internal controls, and understand how to solve problems with What-If Analysis features. In addition, you’ll master new features and functions such as XLOOKUP, Dynamic Array functions, LET and LAMBDA, and Power Query, while learning how to leverage shortcuts and nuances in Excel. By the end of this book, you’ll have a broader awareness of how to avoid pitfalls in Excel. You’ll be empowered to work more effectively in Excel, having gained a deeper understanding of the frustrating oddities that can arise daily in Excel.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Improving Accessibility
6
Part 2:Spreadsheet Interactivity and Automation
12
Part 3: Data Analysis

Custom VBA worksheet functions

VBA is short for Visual Basic for Applications, which is the programming language that you can use in Excel for Windows and Excel for macOS to create macros and custom worksheet functions known as user-defined functions. Over the years, I’ve made a few half-hearted attempts to learn other programming languages, but I never got any traction because I find the ability to program in Excel to be practically limitless, at least for my purposes. With that said, I do write much less code these days, thanks to Power Query, which I will discuss in the next chapter.

Tip

Excel for the web does not support Visual Basic for Applications, which means you cannot even open workbooks that contain macros on that platform.

The Chapter 11 – BOX_VOLUME and XBOX_VOLUME.xlsm workbook already has the programming code installed for two user-defined worksheet functions. You may encounter the security warning shown in Figure 11.28, which means you won’...