Category Archives: Computing – general

New Links – 2018

Posted on June 3, 2018 by

Some new links to active Excel related blogs: David Hagar has been active in the Excel community for many years, and has published the Excel For You blog since 2013.  I was led to it by a recent post on a UDF … Continue reading →

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Office Insiders and Power Pivot

Posted on May 20, 2018 by

I recently discovered another benefit of the Office Insiders program through the ExcelUnplugged blog, which has a feature on the new linked data types in Excel.  More on those another day, but in addition to JavaScript UDFs, the added feature that I found to … Continue reading →

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The Countif bug (and how to avoid it)

Posted on December 22, 2017 by

The Countif function counts the number of cells in a range that match some criterion.  If we enter 1,2,3 in cells A1:A3 and enter =COUNTIF($A$1:$A$3,A1) somewhere else, it will return 1: But if we enter three text strings with 16 … Continue reading →

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Excel Uservoice and Python for Excel

Posted on December 18, 2017 by

The Excel Uservoice site is a forum for users to post suggestions for improvements to Excel.  A suggestion to add native Python support to Excel, as a replacement to VBA, has had by far the most votes since the start, and … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing - general, Excel, Link to Python, VBA | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Working with milliseconds in Excel

Posted on May 27, 2017 by

A recent post at Eng-Tips looked for a solution to problems with working with times in Excel, when time differences are required to the nearest millisecond. The problem is that although times may be entered as a time/date value, and formatted … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing - general, Excel, UDFs, VBA | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Indexing pdf content, again

Posted on March 4, 2017 by

I discovered today that my latest computer (with 64 bit Windows 10) had not been indexing the content of pdf files, which makes doing a search on local file content pretty much a waste of time.  Checking the file search settings … Continue reading →

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Running exe files from Excel

Posted on June 30, 2016 by

Following on from the previous post (running a compiled Fortran finite element analysis program from Excel), this post looks at the details of calling any command line routine from Excel, through VBA.  The important points that need to be addressed are: Writing … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing - general, Excel, Finite Element Analysis, Fortran, Geotechnical Engineering, Newton, VBA | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments