Is there a simple way to design a form for displaying (and printing on A4) data from an Excel sheet?
Lets say there are 200 rows in the Excel with 4 columns. I would like to make each row more readable by rearranging it like this on A4 paper (see attached diagram), instead of just printing in tabular form straight from Excel.
Can that be done without programming, but only field mapping from a form to Excel sheet?
Data entry not required. View and print only.
A4 printed output should look like this
I think you are out of luck with Excel unless you can write a VBA macro to rearrange the table data.
One option is to use a Reporting tool e.g. you can link/import the Excel data into Access and build a Report, which will allow you freedom to show each record as you like.
You could do a mail merge into Word, as if you're printing labels on a form. It's the same idea, just different data.
There are many examples online, no coding necessary.
Here's one from Microsoft, with plenty of links within in:
How to use the Mail Merge feature in Word to create and to print form letters that use the data from an Excel worksheet
Related
I collect various data in time plots. If I copy the timeplot data and then paste it into Excel, the number format is often wrong. For example, I often get a date like Aug 94 instead of the actual number from the TimePlot. Unfortunately, I can't easily format this date into a number either, since the formatted number does not match the actual number from the timeplot. If I format the date in the same format as the number above and below, then I get the number 34547. However, this number does not correspond to the actual number of the TimePlot. Anyone know how I can prevent this problem?
You can only solve this on the Excel side, AnyLogic provides the raw data for you. Excel then interprets stuff. You can test it by pasting the chart raw data into a txt or csv file.
So either fix your Excel settings or paste into a csv, then into an xlsx.
Or better still: Do not manually paste at all. Instead, write your model results into the AnyLogic database and export to Excel from there: this takes away a lot of the pain for you. Check the example models to learn how to do that.
This is not AnyLogic question, rather an Excel & computer formatting problem. One way of resolving this is changing computer's date and time settings.
Another way is to save your output at txt file in AnyLogic. Replace all . with ,. Then open empty Excel, select Text format for the columns. Copy-paste from the txt file.
In Excel there are a few options
when you paste use paste as text only option
But this does not always work as Excel will still try to format the stuff for you
Use the Paste Special option and then choose text
Also possible this will not work, based on your Excel settings.
Paste using the text import wizard
(This works for me without fail)
On step 2 choose tab delimited
On step 3 choose Column format as text for every column (you need to select them in the little diagram below)
You will then see the data exactly as it came from AnyLogic. See the example below where I purposefully imported some text which has something that Excel will think is a date. You will now be able to see what in your data made Excel thing your data needed to be formatted the way it is and then you can fix it. (post a new question if you struggle with this conversion)
But as noted by other answers first prize is to write all the important data to external files. But I know that even I sometimes want to export data from a chart and review it in Excel. Option 3 works for me everytime
I'm trying to search the website "capfriendly.com/players/" using a column of cells and import the "Cap Hit" value back into excel in the adjacent column for each.
I'm a complete beginner when it comes to programming, so I've mostly been trying to learn from previous questions such as this one: excel macro to search a website and extract results
I'm still pretty perplexed, especially with how to extract just the specific value I'm looking for. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.
I don't know which version of Excel you work with.
Anyway you can try this :
Create a new sheet.
Go to Data in the ribbon to get external data and choose "From web".
Input the url of your page ie https://www.capfriendly.com/browse
After a moment you should retrieve "Results" data that you can load with or without structure modifications. You now have a data table in your new sheet.
You can now access it with Vlookup or similar function, with VBA code or with formulas, to put specific data on specific cells of specific sheets like you need to.
Hope it helps.
I have an excel file that I need to read into Power BI. Unfortunately I have no control over this file as its auto generated from another person.
Some of the cells in this file are just filled with colours and I want to be able to translate these colours when importing the data into Power BI.
For example if the colour is green in excel then show true in the corresponding power BI cell. At the moment it's just blank.
Does anyone know of a way to get cell "meta" data like colour from excel in Power BI?
Don't give up just yet...
I found an example that works in a roundabout way using Power Query in Excel. It will give you the meta data associated with each cell by its address (e.g. A1 is highlighted with color FFFFFF00). I relied on some Excel functions to associate the highlighted cell addresses with the cell values. Pulling the cell data with Power BI might take some additional work.
The technique is to use Power Query to open the Excel .xlsx file, which is basically a .zip file containing .xml documents. The color information for each cell can be extracted into a table. From there I was able to use INDIRECT() statements to read from the .xlsx workbook and extract the values from the colored cells. It worked quite well for me.
You can find a working example in the forum in the link below. The user defined DecompressFiles function in the sample uses the Binary.Decompress command to access the XML files within the .xlsx file.
https://www.excelguru.ca/forums/showthread.php?7047-Extract-Cell-Color-with-M&p=28875&viewfull=1#post28875
In my situation, I had a database export of about 7,000 rows and 50 columns into Excel. Working offline, users then went through Excel and made changes, highlighting every cell they had changed. Then they wanted me to update the database with only the highlighted cells. The background color used by each person varied but I didn't care what the color was, just that it was colored.
For each changed cell I was able to generate SQL statements to update the database and also insert into a transaction log table. The main database table was mostly flat but the few foreign key lookup values that were modified I had to update manually.
Column F uses the Indirect formula to pull data from the source workbook. Note that the source workbook must be open for the Indirect formula to read from it.
=INDIRECT("'[" & Import_Filename & "]" & Sheet_Name & "'!"&[#[SheetCellRef.2]])
Column G refines the data in Column F by putting quotes around strings or NULL if the cell is blank.
Column H grabs the column heading to know what field to update.
Column K grabs the Record ID value from the row specified in Column E.
I have had to run this process three different times for the users so my time invested paid off quickly. All I have to do is put their latest highlighted Excel file in the local folder and refresh the Power Query to generate new SQL statements.
Sorry I don't have a 'solution' posted right here. The process is still a little fragile and I'm trying to make a more robust example I can share. Stack Overflow doesn't seem to be set up for ongoing development of a solution. The point of this answer is to give hope to some of you who are desperate for a solution and won't take 'No' for an answer.
Sigh.
Color is not data. Unfortunately, many people color-code cells and then expect to be able to do things based on the color of the cell. But it's not that simple.
Although Excel now provides some ways to filter by cell color, it still cannot identify cell color with a worksheet formula.
Hence, you will need a VBA routine that evaluates all cells and records their colors in another table, which you will then need to push into your Power BI data model.
In the long run, it might be easier to talk to that other person who produces the color coded cells, and teach them a better way of doing things. Show them how to use conditional formatting based on cell values for color coding. The logic used for conditional formatting can also be applied to classify the data in Power BI.
From a data architecture point of view, the best solution is to address the problem at the source, instead of creating tools to handle bad data input.
Just sayin'.
I am trying to write a VB script in Excel to parse some data in an Excel cell. To parse the data correctly, I need to utilize the formatting in the cell. For example, the text to be parsed below should be parsed as follows: a. MINESHAFT B. DARNLEY BAY. The only way to tell this is because MINESHAFT is displayed in a smaller font.
Is there anyway I could right a VB script that could parse the cell text based upon the hidden formatting codes in the cell.
Text to be parsed: MINESHAFT DARNLEY BAY
I'm currently trying to accomplish this in Mac 2011 Office Excel, but I could also do in on a PC Excel 2010 if it makes a difference.
Thanks for you help.
I'm sure you probably can find out the font of a section, but I think you should analyse your data to try and find another way of pulling out the information you want.
Why is the first word a different font?
Are there a finite number of MINESHAFT words?
Could you find the MINESHAFT, ETC word at the begining and put that in a, and then put the rest of the string into b?
If you post a greater amount of data you are trying to parse we might be able to help.
My Access programming is a little rusty, & I've never worked with Excel files all that much.
I have a requirement to bring data from Excel spreadsheets into Access 2007. These spreadsheets have a fixed (predictable) format, but it includes a "header area" where I need to read single data items from specific cells, followed by a mass of tabular data (~500 rows in the one sample I've seen so far). I will be processing all of this into a set of tables that are normalized quite differently from the flat layout of the spreadsheet.
I know how to open an ADO recordset on the tabular data, and it should work fairly well for my purposes. I also figure that I can reference the Excel object model and open the sheets through Automation to get the "header area" data items.
My question is this: since I have to (I think) use the Automation approach for the "header area", am I better off just leaving it open in this mode to move on to the tabular data (with cell/range navigation), or closing that mode & going over to ADO? I suspect it's the latter--and I'd be more comfortable with it--but I don't want to do the wrong thing just because it's more familiar.
Edit
It seems I wasn't clear that I need to build this capability into the "application", as something that a user can repeat down the line. I'm assured that I can trust the format of the spreadsheet (though I'll include error trapping for graceful failure if that turns out to be false). These spreadsheets are "official design documents" for hardware, and my app needs to handle bringing in new &/or updated ones to track the things that are described in the tabular data in ways that the flat Excel format diesn't allow for.
Of those two options, I would choose the second simply because I find it more convenient to work with an ADO recordset. It should be fairly simple if you can assign a named range to your spreadsheet's tabular data.
Edit: If your spreadsheet includes field names, the recordset approach would be less prone to break due to spreadsheet changes such as one or more new columns inserted before or between the existing columns or a re-ordering of the existing columns.
But actually, I think the TransferSpreadsheet Method might be more convenient. You can specify the spreadsheet range as a named range or by cell address as in this example from the linked page:
DoCmd.TransferSpreadsheet acImport, 3, _
"Employees","C:\Lotus\Newemps.wk3", True, "A1:G12"
Also, you can choose between importing the spreadsheet range directly into an Access table, or linking to the range as a "virtual" table ... whichever best meets your application's needs.
Edit2: Creating a link (acLink instead of acImport) with TransferSpreadsheet would allow you to execute SQL statements against the link table:
INSERT INTO DestinationTable (field1, field2, field3)
SELECT foo, bar, bat FROM LinkedTable;
If the header information is really complicated, this can simplify your coding work:
In the official design Excel file, create a hidden tab.
In that tab, make a 1-row table connecting to all the header elements you're interested in. (i.e. set row 1 column 1 to "Document#" and row 2 column 1 to Sheet1:A1)
Then you can re-use the same VBA procedure to import both your tabular data and your header data.
I would do it all via Automation. Why have two separate processes where one will do? After you've read the header information reading the tabular information will be quite easy.
I inherited an application back in mid-2000 that was built to import Excel spreadsheets that were basically reporting output from MYOB (an accounting program). What had been done was to simply create a template table that had all the columns necessary to accomodate the report, using text data type for all columns. Then the non-data rows were filtered out and processed into the eventual destination table.
It's not elegant, and doesn't require a lot of programming, though the implementation I inherited used a dedicated temp table for each report layout that was being imported. You could easily replace all of those with a single table with 100 text columns of 255 (or memo fields, for that matter, if that was a requirement), and just re-use it.
I'm not sure if I'd recommend it or not, but it really is quite easy without requiring much in the way of code.