Introduction

This is a very simple add-in that adds a button to the Review tab's Proofing group, allowing the user to have Excel read the selected cells back to them aloud.

In truth, this add-in does not really add any functionality that has not existed before. In Excel 2003 and earlier, you could find this ability under Tools-->Speech-->Show Text to Speech Toolbar. But for some reason no button was put in Excel 2007 to give you the ability to have Excel speak your cell contents back to you. This simple Excel 2007 add-in gives you back the ability to quickly locate this functionality.

Introduction

How many times have you built a table of data, and put totals on it. You ship it out the door, and another user comes along and inserts a new row right before the totals row? If you have seen this in play, you'll know that the new row is actually inserted between the end of the data range and the totals row, meaning that your sum formula no longer picks up the entire range of data!

Fortunately, the issue with missing rows in totals can easily be fixed so that a user can insert a row immediately above your totals without missing the last line(s). Here's how:

Create a named range

Introduction

When keying in large amounts of data, it can be helpful to have Excel read the input back to you... either as you go, or after you have finished. In either case, this lets you focus on reading the numbers from the page, comparing what you have typed to the original values.

This article covers both scenarios individually.

Macro Weaknesses

1. The speech application reads information back phonetically. So if you are concerned about having names or words actually pronounced correctly, you may have to modify them a bit in the text.
2. The speech application reads quickly enough, but there is a noticeable delay between when the speech ends and when text will actually start registering in the cell. It may not be a good idea to activate immediate read-back if you are a quick typer.

What are Styles?

A style is pre-defined set of formatting instructions held together in one convenient package. They can be configured to apply one, two or many formatting characteristics, and can be applied to a worksheet cell or range very easily.

Why use Styles?

The biggest reason that you'd want to use styles is their ease of use when you want to update a cell, be it a color/colour change, number style or font. If you have a style set up, you simply need to change it in one place, and every other cell in your entire workbook that uses that style is updated with it. We'll work through an example to show how these benefits can be used to our advantage.

What are dates?

This may seem like a strange thing to ask but, as far as Excel is concerned, dates are numbers. By storing them as such, it gives us the ability to add or subtract days to/from a date, as well as get the difference between two dates. If dates were stored as text, this would not be possible. Storing dates as numbers also allows us to construct far more complicated formulas, based on results that we may want to know.

The first thing that we need to know is how to recognize if a date has been entered into a cell as a number, (which will be interpreted by Excel as a date,) or text, which won't. Probably the quickest is to look at the alignment of the cells.

Introduction:

This article covers the basics of using Form Controls in an Excel worksheet, and originated from one of my blog posts, which can be found here.

While I don't tend to use Form Controls a great deal, they are certainly one of the Excel features I'm glad are in the toolbox. The main reasons I'll use one of the Form Controls are:

1. They give an obvious visual style to your worksheet
2. They can be used to force users to choose one of your provided options (Pro-active data validation)

Excel has a very handy little feature that is included on the Excel status bar. It shows a quick snapshot of information that may be helpful if you are working with numbers.

To display its use, enter a few numbers into a range of cells. For the purpose of this example (pictured below), I've just filled random numbers into cells A1:A5.

Now, highlight the range of numbers. On the bottom taskbar, right hand side, you will see something that says SUM and a number. This is a quick total of the range you have selected. And better yet, you can change what shows up! This feature can be customized to show the following items in the selected range:

XLG Favourites

This add-in was created to increase the functionality of Excel and address some shortcomings in the "Most Recently Used Files" listing. While we can increase the list to hold 9 items, I frequently use more than that many files during one of our month ends. It's also well known that long file names get abbreviated and difficult to read. This add-in addresses these issues, among other things.

The work is based very closely on the original "Favorites Add-in" created and published by Daniel Klann. It was his idea to create a menu to hold a list of favorite items. There were two main reasons that I put my own spin on this add-in:

Templates Addin

This addin was created to increase the functionality of Excel, and make it easier to use templates in the MS Office system. I use a lot of templates, and got tired of having to make up to six clicks to open one. Now, I have a menu that holds all of my MS Office templates (not just Excel), only three clicks away.

Features:

1. Adds a menu to hold all Excel, Word and Powerpoint templates.
2. Open any MS Office template right from Excel. (No more guessing what application you built it in!)
3. Adds a separate submenu for each folder in your templates directory to keep them organized.

Introduction:
I can't claim the original idea for this article. The concept actually comes from Professional Excel Development, but I developed the code, such as it is here, on my own. The reason for this was because I couldn't find it in the book when I went looking for it, so I knocked up my own version, and decided to post that here.

This is kind of a neat little routine, which adds a "DebugMode" property to the ThisWorkbook module. It also checks the MS Office username every time someone opens the file, and if it's me, it asks me if I want to use Debugging Mode.