Tag Archives: VBA

Shared Excel Tools Website

Shared Excel Tools (sharedexceltools.com) is a website aiming to provide quick solutions to tasks commonly performed in MS Excel. I wanted this tool many years ago when I started to write VBA scripts to automate various tasks. It has always seemed crazy to me that we have such an effective tool with Excel VBA, but because there is no structure or organisation, it becomes very inefficient. It is common for the same routines to be rewritten many times by various people and sometimes even the same person when they loose access to their data for some reason.

My original idea was to have advanced selection criteria around a central list of Excel solutions.  Users could use various search methods (ie groups, tags and search terms)  to narrow down on the area they are interested in. Also, if enough users contributed, feedback and suggestions could be used to make various solutions more solid and the available scripts more numerous. I intended on having functionality to allow people to contribute to solutions with a system of version control. A bug reporting section would be important and could also be used to allow users to make suggestions.

After being put aside for many years, the time and place for this site seems to have come and gone. VBA can be expected to lose popularity in the years to come and git is now a common way for people to contribute to projects. Still, I wanted a location to keep my scripts that I can access whenever I like and to share with others as well. Hence I have gone ahead with version 1.0.   It’s a watered down version of the original idea but it has the benefit of requiring much less time and effort to implement.

Version 1.0 is pretty much in place at: sharedexceltools.com

Some ‘minor’ things still need to be ticked off and, more notably, the bulk of the scripts still need to be added. Those will need to be checked and sometimes, modified. It can take some time.

I am also putting my solutions on github as well (github.com/drared/SET_Solution_Archive). This mostly takes care of version control for any scripts that I want to update.

If it turns out well and time permits, I will consider updating the site to 2.0 which will be closer to the original concept.

 

Shared Excel Tools

Over many years of working in data processing and data analysis I accumulated various MS Excel tools that I like to use. However, it always seems that when I need them, they are not in a convenient location and trying to share them with others is often also quite inconvenient.

To address these issues and to add to the MS Excel community, I decided a looonnnnggg time ago to build a site that focuses on linking MS Excel users with MS Excel tools. My intention is to try and keep it targeted at allowing a user to quickly search a database of potential solutions and extract the solution in a usable form as easily as possible.

So I have been working on a site to do just this. I have called it, very imaginatively, ‘Shared Excel Tools’. It is still very much in construction but it is online and can be found here:

Shared Excel Tools – Still under construction…