I've been there… I found a new macro that promised to automate a particularly annoying task, save me a ton of time and make me significantly more efficient in Excel. I tried to run the macro. And then… Something like this happened: Sigh... The first time I saw such a message in Excel, several questions popped immediately in my head: What security settings … [Read more...]

You're probably aware of how annoying and time-consuming cleaning up data can be. The New York Times reported that, according to interviews and expert estimates, data scientists "spend from 50 percent to 80 percent of their time mired in this more mundane labor of collecting and preparing unruly digital data". As you're probably aware, the process of cleaning up data with … [Read more...]

So you've created your first (or your first few) Excel macro(s), perhaps by following these 7 easy steps to create a macro. By now, your colleagues are already looking at you like you're a wizard. That is a great sign that you're on a good way to learning macros and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). However… Being able to create a basic macro in Excel is only the … [Read more...]

Do you track what proportion of the time you spend working on Excel goes away in small and relatively unimportant, but repetitive, tasks? If you have (and perhaps even if you haven't), you have probably noticed that routine stuff such as formatting or inserting standard text usually take up a significant amount of time. Even if you have practice in carrying out these … [Read more...]