Excel Text Limit

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Excel 2007 Hyperlink Limitation

For a couple of years now I’ve been pulling IT service desk statistics into a spreadsheet and setting up worksheets to break down and analyse the data in various ways.  The number of worksheets has subsequently grown a significant amount and I wanted to create a front worksheet that contained hyperlinks to and brief descriptions for each of the subsequent worksheets.

This is straight forward to do in Excel.  Press CTRL+K to bring up the hyperlink dialog and select the “Place in this document” set and then just select the worksheet you want the hyperlink to link to.  The issue I discovered was that this really does only apply to worksheets.  I had several chart sheets inserted into the workbook and these were not being listed in the hyperlink options.

As a result I’ve copied the charts from each of the chart sheets and pasted them as items on new worksheets.  An inelegant solution, but a practical one that doesn’t involve adding a macro to do the job.

Finding the size of a Microsoft Office 2007 file

Prior to Microsoft Office 2007 (MSO2007), office provided a quick and simple way to find out just how big your file was.  This was done by selecting the properties option from the file menu which then displayed the same file properties dialog box that you could select from the file in Windows Explorer.

In MSO2007 the information is still available, but has been annoyingly ‘hidden’ somewhat deeper in the application.  In fact it is so awkwardly hidden that I know many people have not come across how to access it … so I thought I’d share.

Along with the menu item click options I’ve included the accelerator / shortcut keys to help make this as quick as possible.

1. Select the ‘Office button’ [ALT+F].
2. Select the ‘Prepare’ menu item [Press E].
3. Select the ‘Properties’ menu item [Press P].
4. In the ‘Document Properties’ section that appears, click the title (“Document Properties”) of the section to reveal a drop down list containing just one item – ‘Advanced Properties’.  Select this item to display the file properties.

NB: Please keep in mind that until you save a file, the properties window will not provide a file size though other file properties may be populated.

Multiple Monitors

Several months ago I got a Dell Latitude E6400 laptop to replace my overworked Dell Latitude D410.  Along with the laptop I got a new advanced E-dock which included two monitor outputs, so I recycled an old smaller monitor that had been relegated to the stores to have a dual monitor set-up.

I find the two monitor set-up really useful and I frequently have different applications in different windows as you might expect.  However I struggled with Excel as I would frequently want to copy data between large format spreadsheets and I would have loved to have one on each screen … but they simply opened as child windows and I Alt-Tab’d between them.

I guess I never really stopped to think about it, but one day my subconscious kicked in and I realised that if I chose not to open the files directly I could open multiple instances and then open a file in each.  Then each instance of the application can be dragged to a different monitor.  Hey presto a spreadsheet in each window.

Excel – Dynamic Named Range

I’ve recently been helping some colleagues develop some reporting templates and they had a very particular requirement around drop down lists (which I’ll probably post about at some point in the future).  One issue that did occur however was that the dynamic lists that were incorporated into the workbook were added to and even though I had mentioned to the users about using Excel’s name manager to redefine the range of cells with that name, they forgot and inevitably the workbook would end up back with me to rectify.

Use name manager to define the dynamic range

I decided that I’d try and find a way of defining a range so that it would automatically extend itself when another cell entry was added to the bottom of the list.  It turned out to be more straight forward than I’d initially thought it might be.  The statement below sets a range that will begin at cell “A2” on worksheet “Sheet1” and extend down for the number of cells that contain a text entry.  It assumes that the list is unbroken and that the top cell is the name of the list (hence the -1after the “COUNTA”). Whilst the name is not essential I include it as having the name of the list in the top cell allows me to prgramatically carry out list operations by referencing the top cell in a column.

=OFFSET(Sheet1!$A$2,0,0,COUNTA(Sheet1!$A:$A)-1,1)

Example list

The screen shot on the right shows a sample list of colours that has a range defined by using the function above.  A drop down list is automatically populated from this list and is shown in cell B2.