Getting Bigger All The Time

in which we try to get tricky with Excel and find that Excel has adequate built-in trickiness already, thank you very much indeed

Over the years I’ve had a number of roles that involved fixing, tuning, cleaning and otherwise future- and bullet-proofing a fair number of Excel workbooks. There’s a whole catalog of potential issues to entertain and amuse but very common is the Extending Input Data Set. (I capitalised that in the hope that I might have christened some kind of Excel anti-pattern).

Your average Excel user is smart enough to know that some input data may grow over time: they may be copy-pasting from some other source, grabbing a database query result or even just typing in more values over time. It’s very common to see a row-by-row enrichment of such data for analysis and the formulae need to be extended to match the rows of input data. In the worst case, users have pre-copied more rows than they expect ever to need and don’t notice when they’ve started to miss data. More happily, they copy down as they see the data extending. If they see the data extending, that is¹.

Helping a colleague to avoid such an unpleasantness recently led to a couple of interesting (to me) solutions. Firstly, we looked at extending the calculations applied to a list of data that we knew would extend every time we ran the spreadsheet model.

We assume we have a defined name, input_data that does what it says. Further, we have output_formulae, which should correspond one-for-one with the input_data rows. When input_data  changes, we want to automatically extend output_formulae to match. Pretty straightforward, as it turns out:

Private Sub Worksheet_Change(ByVal Target As Range)
  If Intersect(Target, Range("input_data")) Is Nothing Then
    Exit Sub
  End If
  ExtendOutputFormulaeAsRequired
End Sub

Sub ExtendOutputFormulaeAsRequired()

  Dim inputRowCount As Long, calcRowCount As Long
  inputRowCount = Range("input_data").Rows.Count
  calcRowCount = Range("output_formulae").Rows.Count

  If inputRowCount <= calcRowCount Then
    Exit Sub ' enough formula rows already - could reduce if needed, but not done here
  End If

  With Range("output_formulae")
    ' Assumes just formulae are needed:
    .Offset(calcRowCount, 0).Resize(inputRowCount - calcRowCount, .Columns.Count).Formula = _
        .Rows(calcRowCount).Formula
  End With
End Sub

That works pretty well. At least, it does if input_data is defined, something we can usually do fairly easily, using a named formula, something like =OFFSET(B2,,,COUNT(B:B),6) (assuming we have 6 rows and there’s a non-numeric column heading in B1, which in this case there is).

Here’s the wrinkle that gives rise to the second interesting (to me) question, that necessitated a question on Stack Overflow. What if I can’t be sure that all my columns will be the same length? I want the length of the longest column (there won’t be gaps vertically, which is something at least). So in the sample below, there are 7 rows of data in columns B to G, with a heading on row 1, so 7 is the longest column and defines the number of rows in input_data.

Input data – extend me!
1	1	1	1	1	1
1	1	2	1	1	1
1	1	1	1	1	1
1	1	1	1	1	1
		1		1	1
		1
		1

I don’t want to use .CurrentRegion because I can’t be certain that adjacent cells won’t be populated at some time in the future. We can’t do something like MAX(COUNT(B:G)) because COUNT() is built to handle two-dimensional ranges. I tried to be tricky, {=MAX(COUNT(OFFSET(B1:G1),,,1000000,1))}, hoping that Excel would evaluate the COUNT() for a set of OFFSETs from B1 to G1. Excel wasn’t fooled. Stack Overflow time then, and enter SUBTOTAL(), a function I confess I’ve never used in over 20 years of Excellence.

I define a new name, input_data_columns as =Sheet1!$B:$G, which I can then use in the definition of input_data_rowcount:

=MAX(SUBTOTAL(2,OFFSET(input_data_columns,,COLUMN(input_data_columns)-MIN(COLUMN(input_data_columns)),,1)))

In a worksheet this needs to be Control-Shift-Entered as an array formula, but there’s no obvious way to do this when defining a Named Formula. Fortunately, although I don’t understand why, it works OK anyway, leading in turn to input_data becoming

=OFFSET(Sheet1!$B$2,0,0,input_data_rowcount,6)

That works! Is it future-proof? Probably not² but it might very well be an improvement on what came before.

Briefly checking what happens, if we remove the MAX() and put the remainder into a worksheet as an array formula, we get {4, 4, 7, 4, 5, 5}, which is indeed the result of COUNT() on each column.

---

¹ From a selfish perspective, this is a Good Thing – it requires “professional” expertise to deal with and has put bread on my table many a time.

² See ¹

Lazing On A Sunny Afternoon

(stackoverflow rep: 2906, Project Euler 59/230 complete)

Below (lightly edited) is a recent answer to a question on StackOverflow. The question is pretty much a waste of time, but what an answer!

Laziness is indeed the first of the Three Programming Virtues, but it is misunderstood. Programming Perl defines it well:

* LAZINESS: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure.

Good programming calls for laziness, but laziness requires hard work. Good programmers must constantly think of and implement new ways to be lazy. The first compiler had to be written in assembly, and the first assembler had to be written in machine language. Wonderfully lazy, but hard. You don’t get to call it a day after an hour just because what used to take a day takes an hour.

That’s about as close to an encapsulation of my personal programming philosophy as I’ve ever seen. The virtue of Laziness is closely related, if not identical to the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) Principle as espoused by the Pragmatic Programmers in The Pragmatic Programmer.

(I just found myself wondering if there’s a way to refactor that last sentence to remove some of the duplication)

Laziness - all I have to do is this...

The idea behind xlUnit (which has been languishing somewhat since being codeplexed in, good grief, September) was to minimise the amount of manual repetition involved in testing Excel/VBA code as it is developed. As a useful side-effect, it also made TDD (Test-Driven Design, or Development, depending on your choice of definition) possible. A fair amount of the code complexity of the framework is involved in eliminating repetitive manual tasks such as test class creation.

There are only three significant UI-level entry points in xlUnit as it stands: application creation (used rarely, only about once per app) class creation, used rather more often, and test execution, which is used all the time. Oh, and there’s a little “Options” dialog, but it only has one setting and that’s not really very interesting so we’ll gloss over that.

Since the first two things are used relatively infrequently, I tucked them away on a menu, whereas the test execution, which is an all-the-time thing, gets a toolbar button. I could have been fancier with that, but I never got past the simple text “Run Tests”, which had the extra benefit of giving a larger target area for the mouse.

...and I get this for free.

There is no interface within the VBE, which is most definitely a shortcoming. To be honest, I only even tried briefly (failing, obviously) to get it to work: with a dual screen setup, which my working environment has had for the best part of a decade, both workbook and VBA are usually visible, so I can get to the “Run” button easily enough. For a similar reason, there is no built-in keyboard shortcut at present. Of course, in Excel 2007, it’s all a bit of a mess. I have the (massive) RibbonX book, by the way, I just need the intestinal fortitude to sit down and read it.

The “Create Testable Application” and “Create Testable Class” routines both live in the add-in itself and are located within UserAccessibleEntryPoints.bas. I’ll come back to “Run Tests” another time – not only was it a bit tricky but I have some new ideas that would make it even trickier.

Choosing to create an application causes a throwaway instance of the xlUnitCodeBuilder class to create a workbook and its tester and create references from the tester to both the application (so it can call classes there) and the framework (so it can use the framework). The same class contains the code to create new classes. I think I put the functions together because they’re about building code but I don’t think I’ve achieved very good separation of concerns here: there’s workbook creation and test class creation and they would probably be better off being separated. Since there’s work to do with Excel 2007 anyway, I think I’ll refactor that bit next time it’s open.

I mentioned “throwaway instance” above without explanation: it’s a way I describe this VB pattern:

    With New UsefulClassThatDoesntReallyNeedToBeDimmed
        .DoSomethingProfound
        .DoSomethingSimilarlyDeep "AndMeaningful"
    End With

Is there a more “standard” way to describe this? Something using “anonymous” perhaps? Anyway, I use it a lot (and I’m now fervently hoping that no-one points out some awful risk that I’m running as a consequence) as it’s a way to get part of the economy of class (“static” methods in Java or C#, where the word means something rather different than in VBA) method.

Stack Overflow not considered harmful

The brainchild of Jeff Attwood and Joel Spolsky,  stackoverflow.com has today shifted itself from private to public beta, in the best tradition of Google applications.

Stackoverflow, a force for good?

I’ve been amusing myself building reputation and acquiring badges since joining a few weeks ago (34 days, it says on my profile page).

The idea, as far as I understand it, is to provide a kind of social network for programmers, based around asking questions and giving geeks and nerds the chance to show off what they know. Which at least shows a good understanding of the target audience. On the plus side, from the initial beta audience, limited in all likelihood to a fairly experienced group, I’ve seen a lot of good answers to questions where I had some knowledge. On the minus side, apart from the mild inferiority complex engendered by how many questions I didn’t understand exposing the narrowness of my technical competence, it can be a little tricky to stay on top of questions bearing tags in which you are interested. Yes, you can subscribe using RSS, but I don’t think I want my Google Reader page clogged up with questions, I think they’re likely to be something I will look at once or twice a day.

I think going forward we probably need a more user-customisable “home” page for the site. “My Stackoverflow”, perhaps? Maybe for now I’ll sign up with another online feed subscription service to keep different stuff segregated. There’s bound to be something that’s not too horrible.

But taking a quick look through my favoured tags this morning threw up an interesting Excel question. It’s one of those “can I do this with formulae or should I go to code” things. Well, there was already a reasonable-looking code solution, so I took a shot at formulae. Aren’t array formulae just the bee’s knees?

So once I’d (hopefully correctly) solved it, I went back to take a closer look at the VB answer:

You bump into the strangest people

Take a look at the site. Answer a question if you can. Ask one if you have one. Let’s see what happens…