Office 2021 or Microsoft 365? Why are there two competing products by Microsoft? What to look for when considering the best choice for you?

A brief history of Office software provisioning and consumption

Historically, Microsoft dominated the personal computing operating system, named Windows since 1985.

Watching successful productivity software take root in the office worker PC, offering word processors, electronic spreadsheets and database-centric applications, Microsoft did what it proves to do best every time: re-invent great innovations, creating highly appealing user experience,...

What is the purpose and difference between Power BI and Excel VBA * When to use what * Or maybe you can use both? * Here is my take on the role Power BI and Excel VBA can play in your setting.

Lucien, one of the professional Excel VBA experts following my Blog and courses approached me this week with this question.

He noted a shift from Excel to Power BI in his workplace and asked about my point of view on the two.

Lucien mentioned that he is more of an “Excel/VBA person” and that the Power BI reports seem slow and not interactive.

What a great question to call for a Blog post!

Send any SQL statement for execution by a remote Database Server from your VBA program * DDL statements allow you to create and alter the schema from your program * Today we write a generic VBA function for adding a column to a table in the Database

This Blog post continues the current series dealing with building robust business applications with Excel VBA and MySQL Database.

If you have not read the previous posts about preparing MySQL Server and Excel for communications and connecting and sending SQL Select statements, read them first.

What are DDL and DML statements?

In the Databases...

Turn Excel into a powerful information systems development platform * Enjoy the power of a relational Database in your Excel VBA applications * Business applications like you never thought possible with Excel * Today we write SQL queries from Excel VBA to MySQL DB

Be prepared!

Last week, I guided you through setting up MySQL server and Excel so that they can communicate with one another.

If you don’t have a ready environment for Excel VBA to talk with MySQL server – complete this first and jump back afterwards.

As I want to focus on writing SQL queries from VBA, I will assume...

Turn Excel into a powerful information systems development platform * Enjoy the power of a relational Database in your Excel VBA applications * Business applications like you never thought possible with Excel * Today we setup and prepare Excel VBA and MySQL Server

Do you dig what I am talking about?

In case you miss the outstanding promise of that title up here, you are about to discover a new world of capabilities and opportunities you have never imagined with Excel.

Most of the business application running our world’s economy (all organizations out there) – rely on a strong...

Excel offers hundreds of functions out-of-the-box * SUM(), VLOOKUP(), NPV() – to name a few * What if you need a function to do something unique, not included in the book? The answer: write it yourself! Here is how.

Functions in Excel

One of the first things you learned in Excel was calling built-in functions.

The basic concept of a function can be summarized in three points:

• It is called and optionally provided with arguments by the caller.
• It implements some logic – its purpose.
• It returns a single data object as a result.

Lets take the LEFT() function to better understand...

Are you automating annual Workbooks, monthly PDF reports, or producing any other dynamic files with Excel? Your program needs to automatically save each file in a folder. Here is how you can construct the full path and filename with a couple of VBA functions

What is a dynamically constructed file name?

When you save a file, you need to point to a particular folder and give it a name.

Your 2022 P&L Workbook may have the following path and file name: \\Shared-Server\Financials\P&L\2022.xlsm

Instead of you manually browsing to the destination folder and typing a filename when you...

When preparing a dynamic report in Excel, you need to arrange the data in the report structure. In this Blog post I demonstrate how to clear the report range and re-populate it with data.

Types of reports

Reports can take many forms, as far as presenting data is concerned.

A report is any artifact created from data for end use, or as required by another system as input.

A report can be a single page summarizing information about something (see the certificate example of last week’s Blog post), it can be an order for an employee to do something (such as in a production order) and it...

Take your Excel model one step further beyond calculations. Prepare and publish the final report as a slick PDF file with a click of a button. Here is how…

Why PDF

PDF has become to be the standard file format for immutable documents.

Immutable, for those not computer programmers yet, means it cannot be changed once it is created.

PDF is highly popular for its quality, compactness, and the ability to sign electronically to render a formal document accepted by private and public institutions.

Preparing the report

What I always do, is dedicate a Worksheet for staging the report. This...

Do you need to generate Excel reports based on a template on a regular basis? Do you need to copy the template Worksheet to another Workbook, or from another Workbook? Here are some approaches with VBA code

Possible use cases for Excel templates

• Your monthly report is based on an Excel Worksheet you prepared, and each month needs to be stored as a separate Workbook with its specific calculations for the month.
• You are preparing and sending your customers a standard letter with calculations / charts that are changing every time. Maybe a quote, or a model calculation. You want to send them...