Bacon Bits: » Tips and Tricks

Easily Navigate Many Worksheets

datapig — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 11:31:40 +0000

Last week, Debra over at Contextures posted an article that showed us lots of nifty ways to navigate a workbook that has many worksheets. Today, I’d like to add my two cents by sharing a small macro that will give you a fairly easy way to jump from sheet to sheet.

We all have them – those workbooks that have 10, 15, 20 or more tabs.

I personally have lots of training workbooks that have 15+ tabs.

When you’ve got a workbook that has this many sheets, it can be a pain to find the sheet you need.

To help, I use this small bit of code to fire up Excel’s built-in navigation helper – the Worksheet Tab pop-up.

Simply copy and paste this code into a new Standard Module

Sub ShowWorksheets()

Application.CommandBars(“workbook tabs”).ShowPopup

End Sub

Once you paste the code in, you will see your newly added macro in your Macro dialog box.

Choose the Options button and assign a shortcut key. As can see, I assigned Ctrl+w to my macro.

At this point, all I have to do is fire my macro by pressing Ctrl+w on my keyboard.

This will activate Excel’s Workbook Tabs pop-up – showing me which tab I’m currently on, and allowing me to easily navigate to a different tab.

If you have more than 15 tabs in your workbook, the last entry in the list will be More Sheets.

Click on More Sheets to get a full listing of all the tabs in your workbook.

Happy navigating!

Use Fill Handle to Fill in the 1st and 15th of Each Month

datapig — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 14:35:17 +0000

Here’s an easy tip from Excel MVP Bob Umlas – author of the new book, Excel Outside the Box.

Let’s say you want to fill in some rows with the 1^st and the 15^th of every month.

So you enter something like 1/1/2012 and 1/15/2012 in the first two rows.

Now you highlight the two dates and try to use the fill handle to drag them down. This is in hopes that Excel will be smart enough to continue your pattern of entering the 1^st and 15^th of each month. Unfortunately, Excel doesn’t work that way. It essentially gives you the pattern of every 14 days.

To get the 1^st and 15^th of every month, you’ll need to right-click the fill handle while dragging down.

When you let go, you will get a series of choices. Choose Fill Months.

If you did that correctly, you will have the 1^st and the 15^th of each month.

This is just one of the 50+ tricks that Bob has included in his book.

Check it out.

Merging Two Staggered Columns

datapig — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 12:23:35 +0000

Last week, I was working with some data when I encountered the need to merge two staggered columns.

That is to say, I needed to merge two columns where the data was blank in either one column or the other.

Here is an example.

I needed to bring placements and pulls into one column.

Piece of cake!

I simply copy the data in one column – with all the blanks.

Then I place my cursor on the other column, right-click, then activate the Paste Special dialog box.

On the Paste Special dialog box, I choose the Skip Blanks option, and then press OK.

As you can see, all the data from the Pulls column has been copied to the Placements column without overwriting the data that was originally in Placements.

Now, I can reformat the table so that only one column shows.

See that – no need for formulas or code. Brilliant!

Formatting Access Queries to the Thousands Place

datapig — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:03:30 +0000

In an Email last week, Christina asks:

“Do you know of an easy way to show Access query results in thousands?
Thanks DataPig.You are the like that black bird on Angry Birds – the bomb.”

Ok….so I added that last sentence. But Christina did ask a pretty good question.

Here’s how you can format Access query fields so that they show as thousands.

You first start with a working query. As you can see, this query shows revenue by market with an indication of how much of that revenue comes from Internet Sales. You’ll notice that the revenue columns inundate you with lots of numbers. That is to say, the revenue columns are difficult to read. Showing these columns in thousands would help readability.

Go into Design View and right click on the query field you want to format.

This will pull up a context menu where you can select Properties.

In the Property Sheet dialog box, you will see the Format property.

Here, you can enter any format syntax you would like. In this case, we want to enter a format string that will give us numbers in the thousands place. So we enter $#,###,.

Once we save and run the query again, we can see that the numbers are in thousands place – making them much easier to read.

Access can handle pretty much any number formatting Excel can. So you can get just as fancy in Access as you can in Excel.

For example, I can get fancy and add a “k” indicator to all the revenue numbers by changing the format string to this: $#,###, “k”.

And remember, this formatting trick can be applied to Forms and Reports also (simply apply the formatting to their respective Format properties).

There you have it Christina. I hope that helped.

Hack into a protected Excel 2007 or 2010 Workbook

datapig — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:35:31 +0000

I’m back from the Power Analyst Bootcamp in Washington DC – and of course, it was a success. 37 of the finest analysts attended the 2-day event, where we shared our passion for Excel, deli meats, and spicy tricks and tips. In the end, everyone left with a bag full of new techniques that will make them better analysts.

While I was gone, there seems to have been a flurry of activity and questions in reference to hacking into a protected workbook. A couple of years ago, I posted a slick technique you can use to hack into a protected 2007 worksheet. Apparently, hacking in a protected workbook is also a highly desired talent. So today, I’ll walk through the steps to hack into a protected workbook.

Excel 2007 and 2010 files are essentially zipped packages that contain XML files. This means that if you take an xlsx file and change the extension to zip, you’ll be able to see all the xml documents that make up your Excel file. Not only that – you can change the content and properties of an Excel 2007 file simply by manipulating the XML documents that make it up.

.

That’s right. You can remove workbook protection simply by applying a simple edit to the xml within the Excel file.

When you encounter a protected workbook, it’s typically locked down so that you can’t change the structure of the workbook. This means you can’t unhide sheets, delete tabs, add sheets, or change the workbook structure in any way.

So let’s start hacking.

Step 1: Make a backup of your file in case things take a turn for the worse.

Step 2: Change the file extension to zip.

Step 3: Extract the contents of the zip file.

Step 4: Go to the extracted files and navigate to the xml for the target sheet (found in the ‘xl\worksheets’ directory)

Step 5: Open the target sheet’s xml document using an XML editor (I use a free editor called XML Marker)

Step 6: Find the ‘workbookProtection’ tag and remove the entire line.

Step 7: Save the edited xml document and replace the old xml document found in the original zip file.

Step 8: Change the extension back to xlsx.

At this point, your workbook is unprotected!

A couple of notes:

1. Any password you see in the XML file is not the real password, nor will it work if you try to use it. It’s worthless.

2. It seems as though this will only work on workbooks that have been protected for structure only. If the workbook has been protected for structure and ‘Windows’, something prevents you from even opening the Open XML package.

3. You obviously cannot do this for Excel 2003 or any kind of xls files.