Spreadsheet Models for Managers


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If Spreadsheet Models for Managersyou use Excel to model businesses, business processes, or business transactions, this course will change your life. You’ll learn how to create tools for yourself that will amaze even you. Unrestricted use of this material is available in two ways.

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Spreadsheet Models for Managers

Session 13
Using Macros I
Summary of Pages

Macros, usually seen as a technical element of any spreadsheet model, are also an important tool of the manager. By encapsulating commonly used techniques in a macro, the manager assures that every time that technique is used, it’s used in exactly the same way. This is the most valuable attribute of any macro — it increases the reliability of the models that use it.

A second advantage, of course, is decreased development cost. Once you have the macro, using it is as easy as using any Excel worksheet function. All intermediate forms are subsumed into the macro. While the costs of any models that use the macro decline, the organization does have to build and maintain the macro, and that isn’t free. So choose wisely those clichés that you capture in macro form.

In this session, you’ll build a few simple macros. The goal of this session is to introduce you to some of the issues that arise for a macro writer. As a manager, you’ll benefit from some appreciation of those issues — you’ll be better able to manage macro writers, and you’ll have a better feel for what the trade-offs are.

Below is a summary of pages for Session 13.

  1. Review of Last Time
  2. What are macros?
  3. Function macros vs. command macros
  4. Why write a command macro?
  5. Why write a function macro?
  6. We’ll work with function macros only
  7. Terminology
  8. Examples of VBA function macros
  9. A little bit of notation
  10. Example
  11. Modules
  12. Module options
  13. How to build a macro to do depreciation
  14. Type declarations
  15. Return value type declaration
  16. Argument variable declarations
  17. Local variable declarations
  18. Returning a value
  19. A simple example
  20. Where we are so far
  21. Figure out what period number we’re in
  22. Methods and properties
  23. Cells, rows, and columns in a range
  24. The column number of the invoking cell
  25. The if statement
  26. A formula for period number
  27. All together now
  28. The main points
  29. Reference readings
  30. Preview of Next Time

Links to other materials for Session 13.

Last Modified: Wednesday, 27-Apr-2016 04:15:26 EDT

Function Macros

We focus on function macros in this course because they’re more likely than command macros to make a real difference in your facility with constructing models. For instance, when your customer wants to see result streams displayed as [Month1, Month2, Month3, Q1 Total, Month4, Month5, Month6, Q2 Total, …], you probably realize that such a layout makes copy/paste and fill very inconvenient. A macro can provide a simple means of producing the preferred layout from a more easily maintained pure month structure. It’s also easy to construct macros for running sums and running differences. Can you think of other applications for function macros that make your models easier to build and maintain?