Windows offers tons of readily available functions that perform almost any task we need. Why not make use of it in our Excel VBA programs? * Here’s what you need to know about calling DLLs in Excel VBA

Modular Programming

As you recall from our computer programming lessons, one of the key concepts in good software design is modularity: breaking our code into functional subroutines or functions, each responsible for a specific task with a clear interface for calling it.

Once encapsulated in a self-contained function, this functionality can be re-used in many locations in your program....

Ever needed to perform some Web task in service of your Excel VBA application? You can write your own web-service to do whatever you need * Popular use cases: access Google Sheets, Docs, Presentations, email and calendar from your Excel application!

Calling Web-services from Excel VBA

As I thoroughly explain and demonstrate in my online course: Beyond Excel Boundaries with VBA: Office, Files and Internet, you can send any HTTP request over an Internet connection from VBA using the WinHttp service library. Here’s a code snippet to send a request to some URL:

    Dim...

Your VBA program needs to send out an original document to the printer. What if the printer is offline, or disconnected? Verify the printer is ready before printing or notify the user of a problem * Here’s the VBA function for that

Why check if the printer is ready?

The first situation in which I encountered the need to verify the printer is ready, was in an application I developed for small business management, in Excel.

In my home country, Israel, tax regulations dictate that the tax invoice confirming the receipt of a payment is printed exactly ONCE. This would be the ORIGINAL...

Excel offers large Worksheets. Data can be arranged and stored flexibly, searched and acted upon. Do we have a Database here? * Let’s sort out Excel as a Database.

What is a Database?

Simply speaking, a database is any structure in which data is to be arranged along with tools to store, manipulate and retrieve the data.

Several such pre-configured “data arrangements” are available as products, each developed in its time to solve data-related challenges. Let’s mention a couple.

Relational Database: In a relational database data is arranged in tables with relations...

When your VBA code finished its task and control is returned to the user – be sure to restore protection, hide Worksheets, enable events, reset the mouse cursor and turn on screen updating * here’s a Sub that will take care of that

A controlled environment for the user

The flexibility, diversity and power of Excel makes it a generic tool for almost any task. However, this richness of options and openness can put your data and business at risk.

Consider a large table you maintain in Excel. Mistakenly, you mis-typed a date to be: 05/10/20020. You didn’t notice. That row is...

If you ever needed to query Excel tables (and who hasn’t) from your VBA programs that contained thousands of rows, or join multiple tables in the process – this is the Blog post you’ve been waiting for * Write complex SQL queries over Excel tables as if they were stored in a relational database

Do SQL and Excel go together?

YES!

SQL is the most popular Databases language. It is robust, proven and works with extremely large tables stored in any common relational Database software. If you want to learn more about Databases and SQL – read my last week’s Blog post...

If you are in anyway related to software in the service of organizations – you MUST be familiar with Relational Databases * Let’s understand the basics of RDB: what, why, strengths and weaknesses

The Beginning

Relational Databases (RDB) drive nearly all of the information systems in the service of any organization today. Despite being a central and critical technology, it’s only 40 years old, 10 years younger than me.

It was Edgar Codd from IBM who first devised the RDB concept in the early 1970’s. Only in 1978 was the first commercial RDBMS (Relational Database...

What if you need to accommodate an unknown number of arguments to be handled by a single function? As with most functional languages, VBA supports this using a ParamArray type * Here’s all you need to know about ParamArray

Passing Arguments to a Function

As you probably know, a function (or subroutine) can accept arguments (or parameters) from the calling function (or sub). These arguments are part of the definition (or “stub”) of the function. For example:

Function AddTwoNumbers(_
ByVal FirstNumber as Single, _
ByVal SecondNumber as Single) as Single

The above function...

How should a dashboard strategy be conceptualized? How do you translate the accumulated data into an effective business compass for the decision maker? Start your journey here

We planned our Dashboards and prepared the data. We’re now ready for the artistic magic: the visual effect and user experience. This is the focus of today’s Blog post, the last in this “all Dashboards” 4-articles series. If you missed the previous parts, start here.

Start with Observation

Now is the time to take the blueprint of our Dashboard we sketched when we planned our Dashboards layout,...

How should a dashboard strategy be conceptualized? How do you translate the accumulated data into an effective business compass for the decision maker? Start your journey here

After we have finished all the preparations for our Dashboard in the previous Blog post of this Dashboards’ Guide series, we’re now ready to start implementing our Dashboard in Excel.

Preparing the Data for the Dashboards

A good data staging serving our Dashboards must be very efficient, to quickly refresh the Dashboards. This implies that we need to carefully strike a balance across all resources required...