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...

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...

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...

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

In the previous Blog post we understood the main aspects and types of Dashboards. In this second of a 4-part Blog post, we start preparing ourselves for the much-anticipated Dashboard.

The Big Picture

The place to start is the business requirements analysis document, we prepared (or received) before we planned and implemented the application. The Dashboards’ elements should already be described right there.

...

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

The importance of Dashboards

Dividing information systems’ role into two main focus areas, we have the operational processes on one hand (OLTP) and the analytics on the other (OLAP).

Considering the ultimate goal of supporting and driving the business, OLTP systems streamline the daily work, govern the processes and control the data as it is being accumulated in the database. OLAP solutions are tasked with...

What separates an Excel model from a professional business application? Besides good programming practices it’s the user experience * Excel VBA User Forms allow you to deliver mission-critical business applications that will make your customer WOW.

Today I launched my third course in the Computer Programming and Databases with Excel VBA and SQL program.  This course, titled Beyond Excel Boundaries with User Forms: Deliver a Professional User Experience, covers User Forms implementation as the user interface for Excel-based business applications.

This launch today made it an easy...

When developing, delivering and maintaining software solutions, you need to manage the Dev-QA-Prod cycle. This is no different when developing an Excel based application * Here’s how I do it

The Basics of Development Lifecycle

After you finish developing a scoped application, you need to pass it over to QA – Quality Assurance. The QA folks are abusing the software and document their exceptional findings: logical errors, software errors, user experience issues, environment conflicts, and the like. Often, issues classified as important will bounce back to development for fixing....