Who Says The Ribbon Is Hard?
Published Tue, Mar 6 2012 20:41 | Bob Phillips
Introduction I was recently chatting with a friend, and he was asking how you can have dynamic ribbon buttons, buttons that are available depending upon worksheet events. I knocked up a simple example, and I thought I would share it here for anyone else...
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Ribbon On The Fly Part2
Published Thu, Mar 3 2011 12:49 | Bob Phillips
Introduction In my last blog post, I described how I thought that I could build an Excel 2007 ribbon on th fly. The technique was founded upon having a ‘worker’ addin that handled the main functionality as well as the version management and...
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Ribbon on the Fly, or the Zip
Published Tue, Feb 22 2011 16:10 | Bob Phillips
I recently needed to build an Excel addin that supported a variable number of options, with buttons to invoke the options. That in itself is not unusual, but I also wanted the numbers to be driven by the user; which always complicates matters. The definition...
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Keep It Simple? Don't be Daft!
Published Sun, Feb 13 2011 14:18 | Bob Phillips
Keep It Simple? Don't Be Daft! I was recently working on a project where we were using SSRS to create XML reports which are then imported into Excel to facilitate further analysis. Unfortunately, I could not see any option in PowerPivot to connect...
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Power To The Ashes
Published Sun, Jan 9 2011 13:35 | Bob Phillips
Power To The Ashes So the excitement is all over, and England have deservedly beaten the Australians at the latest Ashes series. Many late evenings have been spent listening to the coverage on Radio 5, catching the usual humour and generally irrelevant...
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Self Service Is Cheap?
Published Fri, Oct 22 2010 17:05 | Bob Phillips
As I am sure that you are all aware, PowerPivot is the best thing to hit Excel since PED . Although I am not a big data cruncher, I have been playing with PowerPivot; to keep abreast of an important technology; it plays into one of my primary interests...
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VBA Has No Class
Published Sun, Oct 10 2010 13:33 | Bob Phillips
Recently, I was working on one of my apps, one that is database centric. Whilst making some changes, I came across this piece of code that inserts a new record into the database With RS .AddNew .Fields(FIELD_AUDIT_DATE) = sh.Cells(Rownum, COL_FU_AUDIT_DATE...
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Cracking The Code
Published Mon, Oct 4 2010 11:34 | Bob Phillips
Excel’s ability to run pivot tables against an OLAP cube in Analysis Services is a truly wondrous beast. The ease of use; volumes of data; the filtering; all of these provide a rich environment for users to easily inspect their data and get real...
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Does Excel Do MDX?
Published Wed, Sep 29 2010 9:37 | Bob Phillips
One of my primary interests at present is Business Intelligence (BI), using available tools to present meaningful information to the business that actually adds value. I won’t go into what BI is, the quality of BI products available at present,...
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Formulas Made Easy
Published Wed, Sep 22 2010 12:51 | Bob Phillips
I have been playing with PowerPivot recently, and one of the sites I have visited is Rob Collie's PowerPivotPro blog, http://powerpivotpro.com/ . One particular post that caught my eye was a guest post by Colin Banfield , on building complex DAX formulas...
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The US Isn't The Whole World?
Published Thu, Sep 9 2010 17:43 | Bob Phillips
Microsoft sneaked a couple of new functions into Excel 2010. These functions are WORKDAY.INTL and NETWORKDAYS.INTL . They appear to be addressing the age-old question of handling different working day patterns around the globe. Whilst we have Saturday...
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Who Scratched My Table?
Published Sun, Jul 11 2010 11:45 | Bob Phillips
One of the better additions to Excel 2007 are, in my view, the functionality added to tables http://www.jkp-ads.com/articles/Excel2007tables.asp . I was recently working on a 2007 project and I was looking to add some highlighting using conditional formatting...
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Thicker Than A Length of 4be2
Published Wed, Jun 9 2010 12:51 | Bob Phillips
Being a developer can be addictive fun. Sometimes you just get into the swing and before you know it is midnight and the house is eerily quiet. But it can also be hugely frustrating. Yesterday I had just such one of those days. I spent a whole day on...
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Cutting Edge BI
Published Tue, Apr 27 2010 10:53 | Bob Phillips
I went to the SQL Server 2008 R2 launch in London on 15th April 2010 (a while ago I know, but I have been away for a week :-)). I am not a SQL Server DBA or anything such, I went specifically for the BI sessions, PowerPivot and Reporting Services. I have...
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Deploy Me Simple
Published Sat, Mar 27 2010 13:50 | Bob Phillips
Excel 2003 Addins In Excel 2007 Excel 2007 and 2010 is so different in concept to Excel 2003 and before that there are many new challenges in providing solutions that can be deployed in either version. One challenge that I have been faced with is creating...
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The XML Is On The Kid
Published Thu, Mar 11 2010 23:08 | Bob Phillips
I recently wrote about a database tool that I have built to facilitate adding stored procedures to databases, SP Builder . XL-Dennis made a couple of comments, one of which was with regards to the medium used for the script file. He talked about XML files...
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The Kid Grows Up
Published Wed, Mar 3 2010 12:41 | Bob Phillips
In a previous post , I talked about building stored procedures (SPs)in an Access database, and calling the same from Excel using ADO. As I mentioned in that post, I am not a fan of the Access GUI. Whilst GUIs can be okay for doing some simple testing...
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SUMPRODUCT Isn't The Only SP Kid In Town
Published Fri, Feb 19 2010 18:12 | Bob Phillips
If you are a frequent use of SQL Server, or any such enterprise database solution, you are bound to be aware of Stored Procedures (SPs) and the advantages that they bring. In my experience, using SPs is almost de-facto in the SQL Server world. However...
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Typing May Be Good For You
Published Wed, Feb 17 2010 13:03 | Bob Phillips
I have written previously about User Defined Types , where I showed what I feel is a good, legitimate use of UDTs, namely the saving of application settings at the start of my procedures, then re-instating them at the end. I have since extended that technique...
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Cycling Through The Fog
Published Thu, Jan 7 2010 13:19 | Bob Phillips
Dynamic Analysis Excel 2007 provides the capability to have a pivot table connected to an OLAP cube. Furthermore, detailed analysis can be built by using various CUBE functions. One of the great things about Excel 2007 pivots and CUBE functions is that...
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