Friday, March 23, 2007

Clear Excess Formatting in Excel Files

Microsoft have a very interesting tool on their website.

The Excel Excess Formatting Cleaner Add-in program removes all formatting that has been applied beyond the cell range that contains data, or beyond the cell range that is covered by shapes, in each worksheet in the workbook. This reduces the file size of a converted Lotus 1-2-3 file or of a file that has formatting applied beyond the data range.

You can also use this add-in program to resolve various printing and viewing problems that are caused by extra formatting that is applied outside the last cell (as defined by the UsedRange property to determine which cells in the worksheet contain data).
Once installed you can find the application in the File Menu under Close.
This worked brilliantly for the files I tried it on with significant file size decrements of 25%-60%.
As far as I can see the only forseeable problem with this is that sheets that are preformatted to take pasted values (eg. via a macro) could lose their formatting.

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Posted by: Jethro | 2:59 PM |

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Excel charts,

Doug Klippert has this great tip, a formula (that could be put into a User Defined Funciton (UDF), to convert the column number to its actual alpha representation.
The following formula extracts the Column letter:

=SUBSTITUTE(ADDRESS(1,COLUMN(),4),"1","")

Read the explanation and the rest of the story on his post.

Crystal Xcelsius is a very funky charting add in that allows you to:

Create interactive Excel dashboards, business presentations and visual calculators from ordinary spreadsheets – then integrate them into PowerPoint, Word, PDF and the Web.
I am trialling this for a client and its is very cool how you can make on the fly "what if" changes to spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations.

Excel-VBA.com has a wealth of excellent topics and advice for excel and vba users. Some examples include, SUMPRODUCT, SUBTOTAL, the excel calculator, spreadsheet design, shortcuts and more. Well laid out also.

Tommy Flynn's site has a number of Excel VBA examples that you can copy and use including, hiding and unhiding sheets, input boxes, arrays and for next loops. Worth bookmarking.

Talking of which check out my Excel tags, Excel 2007 tags and VBA tags on del.icio.us

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Posted by: Jethro | 9:11 PM |