Excel - Is it possible to declare variables for specific words? - excel

Question

I'm working in a test cases spreadsheet in Excel, last week I ran into a problem, the DEV team decided to change a lot of 'field' labels of the application under test. What I had to do is go to my Excel spreadsheet and modify the labels' name one by one.
What I want to do now is define the names of the labels as variables and then make the changes directly from the variables instead of doing it by occurrence.
For example, I wrote:
"The user inputs the username in 'Name' field".
I want 'Name' to be pulled from a variable so next time they decide to change the label name, e.g: from 'Name' to 'User-Name', I have to only change the variable name from 'Name' to 'User-Name' rather than doing this manually in each occurrence.
Any idea on how can I do this in Excel?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Named Ranges might be beneficial to you. You can refer to a Range of cells by a name and if you ever add columns or rows the Named Range will automatically increment the reference to the Range. Look under the Formulas menu and click on Name Manager. From there you can define a name for any cell range you would like, say:
MyRange = A1:C1
and refer to it in VBA like:
Range("MyRange")
On a WorkSheet you can simply refer to it like this
=MyRange

Answer 2

Sure. Just make a 2-column list in a separate worksheet, where column A is the variable name and column B is the corresponding value. Everywhere you want to reference a specific variable name, perform a VLOOKUP() against that 2-column list.
="The user inputs the username in '"&VLOOKUP("Name",Sheet1!$A$1:$B$30,2,FALSE)&"' field."
Or you wouldn't even need to do the VLOOKUP if you chose to use a one-column list with no field labels. You could refer directly to the cell you want with concatenation, i.e.:
="The user inputs the username in '"&Sheet1!$A$1&"' field."
Even easier, which wouldn't require any special entries would just be to do a global find/replace, which is made more convenient since your fields are enclosed by single quotes. I.e., there's nothing stopping you from replacing all occurrences of 'Name' with 'User-name'.

Answer 3

For example, I wrote: "The user inputs the username in 'Name' field".
If this is in an Excel sheet, you can just concatenate a cell reference into your text. For example, if the field header "User-Name" is in A1 on Sheet1, you would use a formula like this:
="The user inputs the username in '" & Sheet1!$A$1 & "' field."

Answer 4

If you're trying to do this in VBA code, you can always declare constant string variables.
Const strName as String = "Name"
then use it in the code, for example:
MsgBox "The user inputs the username in " & strName & " field"
Hope that helps :)