You’ve spent days in perfecting your Excel model. Sophisticated formulas spanning multiple Workbooks are generating the results you need. But it is now heavy with long delays and response times. What could be the reason and what can you do about it?

The magic of live formulas has its toll

No doubt one of Excel’s magic is the “live grid” in which formulas connect cells, charts and formatting for real-time calculations and rendering. It Is so appealing, that we tend to forget that maintaining the web of connected cells requires resources. Compute and memory resources.

Ever needed to run an Excel Macro every day automatically? I mean, without leaving Excel open or interacting with Excel at all. Here’s how you do this taking advantage of two technologies that comes with Windows

Why schedule a daily silent job?

In one of my customer’s project that manages trainings and certifications, employees receive email and SMS notifications on various events: upcoming training reminders, training result (with a certificate attached), change of instructor, training assessment reminders etc.

The technique for doing that is using a queue. All notifications...

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...