Spreadsheet Models for Managers


Getting Access to Spreadsheet Models for Managers


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

Figure out what period number we’re in 13/21
Session Links
  • Each cell will contain a call to the function macro Depreciation
  • The function will then figure out the period number
  • It needs to know:
    • Where the caller is (i.e., what cell invoked the function macro)
    • Where the first period is
    • The period number is: Column(caller)-Column(first period)+1
  • To find the location of the cell that invokes a function, ask Excel (it “knows”)
  • In VBA for Excel, Excel is called “Application”
    • Application has a property named “Caller” that holds an object that specifies the caller
    • In this instance, Caller holds the invoking cell object
    • To find the column of the invoking cell, ask for its Column property
  • So we need to know how to grab the properties of objects

The story, boiled down, is that when a cell invokes a macro, it deposits a pointer to itself in the Caller property of the Application object. To determine which column we’re in when the macro is invoked, we ask for the Column property of the Caller property of the Application object.

Perhaps this seems like a lot of unnecessary mucking around, but think what happens if we don’t do it. Then we force the user to supply the period number in the invocation of the macro. That makes it difficult for users to employ Copy, Paste, or Fill when using this macro. They would have to create helper arrays that contain the period number.

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?