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As an Mechanical and Electrical Engineer by profession and Computer Programmer by passion I’ve been building my own software tools for over 20 years. My career has taken me across multiple engineering areas including Design, Manufacturing, Field Operations, Maintenance, Refurbishment, Product Development, Asset Management, Customer Service, Process Improvement, Consulting and Software Development. Mainly driven by challenges that I’ve faced on my day-to-day work and my own laziness and refusal to do repetitive and menial tasks, I always find myself creating software applications to automate the boring parts of my job. I quite enjoy the process of facing a brand new challenge, thinking about the bestRead More →

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Create an Excel lookup formula that searches a table using criteria from various columns. It mimics the functionality of the native VLOOKUP() formula using a combination of the INDEX() and MATCH() function. Ingredients Microsoft Excel The Need There is no doubt that one of the most useful and often used Excel functions is the VLOOKUP() function. This function allows us to extract values from a table by specifying a search criteria. However, as we start developing more complex spreadsheets and calculations, we start finding some of its limitations. One of this limitations is the fact that the VLOOKUP() function can only search one column (the left-most) withinRead More →

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Short Description Create a simple Excel function that returns the name of the Worksheet where that cell is. Ingredients Microsoft Excel The Need When working with Excel Workbooks that contain multiple Worksheets, you might need to get the name of the each Worksheet in formulas. For example, I have a few reporting templates where the main title of each page corresponds to the Worksheet name. In that scenario it is handy to have the name of the Worksheet automatically change in the title of the report. This technique is particularly handy to create preformatted Worksheets which you can then copy/paste and customise, starting with theirRead More →

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Short Description Add a Custom Tab to the Office Ribbon with controls to trigger your code functions. Ingredients Microsoft Office Custom UI Editor for Microsoft Office The Need When building custom functionality or macros in a Excel or Word, you might want to provide the user with a User Interface that merges well with the look and feel of the Office native UI. Office started including the Ribbon as its main menu containing paradigm since Office 2007. The Ribbon is defined by an XML tree that describes all the elements that are included in a Ribbon Using a simple technique, you can extend the nativeRead More →

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Short Description Create an Excel Add-in that allows you to add Application Settings functionality on any Workbook. Store and retrieve setting names and values on a centralised location and accessible anywhere from your VBA modules and classes. Ingredients Microsoft Excel The Need Sometimes when you are creating an Excel tool or application, you need a centralised place where you can save and retrieve settings form. As you express the business logic of your application in the form of code on the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) environment, you’ll realise that it’s handy to have a place where you could store and retrieve key-value pairs from any partRead More →

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Short Description Perform searches in Excel rows or columns and extract data in any direction from the found reference. The final form of this recipe is: Searching a column and returning a value in another column =INDEX(<Column to extract value from>,MATCH(<Value of criteria used for looking>,<Column to be searched for value>,0)) Searching a row and returning a value in another row =INDEX(<Row to extract value from>,1,MATCH(<Value of criteria used for looking>,<Row to be searched for value>,0)) Ingredients Microsoft Excel The Need In many scenarios, data held in the form of a table needs to be searched for a certain criteria and when the criteria is met some pieceRead More →