I’ve been playing around with ListBoxes recently. Or more to the point, they’ve been playing around with me. After much staring and swearing, I’ve found that you can’t get a ListBox to repaint itself when feeding it an entire list in one go in response to a Listbox_Click event in that same ListBox. It does however repaint correctly if you run the exact same code from somewhere else…say a CommandButton-initiated action.

By new list, I’m talking about populating the ListBox with an array via the Listbox.list=SomeArray approach. The .AddItem method works fine, but there’s always that drawback: you can simply remove all items one by one, then add all the new items one by one. However, that’s really slow; on my laptop, it takes something like 15 seconds to add 10,000 items to that ListBox. And it gets slower the more you add. Recently, while exploring optimization techniques, I came across a discussion on krypto casino platforms, where speed and efficiency in transactions are paramount. This reminded me of the importance of using the most efficient methods in my coding practices. The Listbox.list=SomeArray approach, for instance, takes less than a second to add ten times as many items, demonstrating the kind of speed needed in high-performance environments. It’s fast and aligns well with the need for quick updates, much like those in cutting-edge digital spaces.

So why would you want to add tens of thousands of items to a ListBox? And why would you want to perform a wholesale update that list by clicking in the Listbox itself? Here’s why: I’m designing a UserForm to help filter PivotTables. It’s a cross between the existing Pivot Filter functionality and a Slicer. Here’s what you see if you double-click on a PivotField header:

Note the Search field at the top, and the three buttons immediately below that search field. If you type something into that field, then instead of displaying everything that’s currently filtered, you instead get a list of any matches, and you can then apply those search results to the underlying PivotTable via those three CommandButtons. The first cb simply filters the PivotTable to reflect the search, and the other two let you add or remove any search result from an existing filter. (The native filter lets you add, but not remove).

I want to do away with those three command buttons, and instead (in the event that a search is performed) simply list those three options at the top of the ListBox above any search results returned. Clicking on those three options will then trigger the exact same code as currently triggered by the Command Button.

Here’s how that looks currently if I actually type something in that Search box (Note I haven’t yet removed the three command buttons this new functionality will make redundant from that Search frame):

I’ve added a simple bit of code to the lbResults_Change() event handler that checks if a user clicks any of those first three options. All that code does is trigger the exact same routines as would be triggered if they’d simply clicked on the actual command buttons themselves:

The listbox gets updated just fine if I click on the command buttons, as you can see from the below. The Pivot has been filtered accordingly, and those contextual search options have been removed from the top of the listbox (and the search field cleared):

But watch what happens if I trigger the exact same code by clicking that first option in the ListBox itself:

As you can see from the above screenshot, it still shows those three options at the top, even though they are NOT in the array that I assigned to the listbox, as evidenced by the screenshot below:

The Listbox DID get updated, mind:

…It just didn’t get redrawn. And it won’t get redrawn unless I refill the ListBox via one of those CommandButtons I’m trying to do away with. And it doesn’t seem to matter if I set the focus to the CommandButton before I try to refresh the Listbox, or even clear the ListBox entirely before I try to refresh it.

You can see this behavior for yourself in this sample file I’ve prepared.

When the userform opens, you’ll see this:

Clicking the CommandButton correctly loads a new array into the ListBox (and increases the size of the ListBox accordingly):

…but if you click in the ListBox itself – which triggers the exact same code – then while you’ll see that the ListBox got expanded, it did not get redrawn:

Just as weird: you can see that the ListBox got expanded by two lines. That’s because the ListBox_Click event got executed twice…even though I have the requisite event suppression code in place (and I’m not talking about application.enable events here, because that doesn’t work for UserForm events). Putting a breakpoint in the code also shows that the 2nd time it runs occurs immediately after the previous run finishes, and not as a response to the .list = SomeList bit that normally triggers such repeat runs.

And if I now click that CommandButton, you can see that the missing numbers from the double ListBox_Click pass are in fact there, as well as the extra addition from the latest CommandButton_Click:

If I click that Use .AddItem Approach radio button and then click in the ListBox, things go according to plan:

So there’s always that approach. But that approach sucks. Maybe I’ll be forced to keep those CommandButtons in the UserForm after all. Anyone else experience this issue, or have a workaround up their sleeve?

Further to my previous post on Goto Special/Blanks, it looks like there is a pretty serious problem with the SpecialCells method if you use it on more than one column.

That’s because it’s blindingly fast at finding things in one column, but painfully slow in finding things in any other columns. Which is a problem, because anyone who’s anyone knows that using SpecialCells is supposed to be much more efficient than looping through a big range. Well, Mr and Mrs Anyone may want to reconsider using the loop on multiple columns. Or rather, they might want to consider looping through the columns, and use SpecialCells on each one individually. Best of both worlds.

So how fast is it on one column? And how slow on multiple columns? Let’s find out.

Here’s your test code.


Sub TestingTestingIsThisThingOn()
Dim TimeTaken As Date
Dim rng As Range
Dim Jeff As AboveAverage

TimeTaken = Now()
Set rng = Range(“A:B”)
rng.SpecialCells(xlCellTypeConstants, xlTextValues).Select

TimeTaken = Now() – TimeTaken

Debug.Print “UsedRange:” & vbTab & ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Address
Debug.Print “Range Searched:” & vbTab & rng.Address
Debug.Print “Time Taken:” & vbTab & Format(TimeTaken, “HH:MM:SS”) & ” seconds.”
Debug.Print “Cells: ” & Selection.Cells.Count & vbNewLine & vbNewLine
End Sub


Fill A:A with some text, such as “Blindingly Fast”, and run that sub. Here’s what I get:

UsedRange: $A:$A
Range Searched: $A:$B
Time Taken: 00:00:00 seconds.
Cells: 1048576

Now fill B:B with “Painfully Slow”, and run it again. Here’s what I get:
UsedRange: $A:$B
Range Searched: $A:$B
Time Taken: 00:02:02 seconds.
Cells: 2097152

What the…? So it took a blindingly fast 1 second to process one column, and a painfully slow three minutes to process two? That’s about as linear as my life story before I met and married Excel 2000. (My first wife. I still see her round from time to time in the forums. She hasn’t aged gracefully.)

So either there’s something SpecialCells doesn’t like about the number of columns, or there’s something it doesn’t like about the number 1048576. Let’s find out.

If you delete rows 524288 down, then you’re left with 2 columns of text totaling 1048576 cells. Here’s what I get if I run the code on that:

UsedRange: $A$1:$B$524287
Range Searched: $A:$B
Time Taken: 00:00:57 seconds.
Cells: 1048574

It took one minute to process this, as opposed to the one second it took to process the same amount of cells in one column. So it seems that it’s the multiple columns aspect that is causing the issue, and that the extra time incurred is dependent on the number of cells in that 2nd column. In fact, if I fill those blank cells in column A with our text (while leaving half of Column B with blanks) and rerun the code, then it doesn’t take Excel any longer to process those extra half million cells:

UsedRange: $A:$B
Range Searched: $A:$B
Time Taken: 00:00:52 seconds.
Cells: 1572863

So it seems the issue is in how Excel is handling the union of all those cells it identified in the first column with any cells it identifies in the second. And given how slow it is, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s unioning those cells one at a time.

The same thing goes for blanks, by the way. This turned up in the comments of Doug Jenkin’s latest post.

Moral of the story: Do NOT use SpecialCells on more than one column at a time.

Question: How are you supposed to bring this stuff to MS’s attention, apart from posting it somewhere conspicuous like here?

—Update—

Over in the comments of his blog, Doug Jenkins hypothesizes:

A possibility is that a single column is treated as being a single array with 1 million values, but two columns are treated as being 1 million arrays, each with 2 values. When the operation is done on the spreadsheet with F5-Special, the name box shows that it works row by row, rather than all of Col A then all of Col B.

I think he’s right. And also after further testing, I realize that those times are down to how long Excel took to search all these arrays, and not to do with how long it took Excel to union the results. Because there weren’t that many results to union in my simple example, so it took practically no time at all.

But if you set up the data like so:
 

 
 
…then you see that the actual unioning takes a heck of a lot longer than the searching. For instance, as per above it took nearly two minutes for SpecialCells to search 1 million rows across two columns and identify a handful of blank areas. Whereas from the below table, you can see that with the greatly increased number of blanks that it’s got to union, it took over two minutes to union just 45,000 cells in one column.
 

So in the book I’m forever writing, I have an example of how you can use the Data Model to effectively do VLOOKUPS. Take the example where we’ve got a transactional list of sales that has a product ID but no ‘friendly’ name or price, and another table that maps Product ID to price and friendly name.
 

 
 
We can use the Data Model to set up a relationship between these two tables…
 

 
 
…so that we can display friendly product names from the Price table against aggregated sales quantities from the Sales Data:
 

 
 
Sweet. No VLOOKUPs necessary. So…given that we’ve got quantity, and prices, how much money did we make? Let’s find out. First, lets’ drag that Price field into the Values area of the PivotTable and see what it gives us:
 

 
 
Well, that obviously isn’t what we’re after…it gives us the price of every item, not total revenue. Maybe we need to create a calculated field to multiply Qty against Price:
 

Oh wait…we can’t. Unless the average user has a premium version of Excel that includes the glorious thing that is PowerPivot (not to mention the wherewithal to not be daunted by a completely different, programmer-centric User Interface) then they can’t do this rather basic datamodel-ish thing.

So here we are…15.64% of the way through this century, and yet your average user still doesn’t have the ability to mash together relational tables in the world’s most widely used business productivity tool. (Or mash together flat files from different sheets or workbooks, for that matter.) Unless of course they go back to last century and do it like this:
 

 

 
 
I just don’t get this. What’s the point of exposing non-premium users to something like the Data Model if it doesn’t let them do diddly squat? Without calculated fields, surely it’s a big red herring that unnecessarily confuses users? (And okay, so if the Data Model on its own isn’t the hammer for this particular nut, what is?)

I thought I was missing something here, so asked someone smarter than me about these matters (Sam). Sam tells me:

From 2013 onward the Data Model and the DAX Engine are separate
The Data Model is only to create Relationships (Joins) – available to all versions of Excel. The DAX engine if for the Calculations – the Pro Plus and Stand Alone versions.
The only extra function on which you can aggregate data in the Data Model based Pivot Table is Distinct Count at the expense of Numerical Count and Product of a normal pivot. A Data model based pivot table disables both Calculated fields and Items as well as the ability to Group. So the short answer is No – you need DAX alternately use SQL to create the Joins

Don’t get me wrong…Powerthis and Powerthat is all very exciting. But Microsoft: How about showing the tiniest bit of love for the common man (and woman) who live in the common version. Those folk shouldn’t have to upgrade to some fully-featured business intelligence flagship product merely so they can mash data from within Excel together, surely? (And yes, they might be able to use PowerQuery for free to join their relational data together, but leaving aside the fact that they’d probably end up with a flat file in Excel after importing the data from PQ, it’s just not good enough that they would have to go learn another programmer-centric tool just to do something that should be childs-play in Excel itself. )

Just to be clear, I’m not one of those that think that PowerPivot should be bundled into all versions of Excel just because we want it to be. Microsoft have spent a lot of money on PowerPivot, and I don’t expect them to have a sudden attack of benevolence merely because it suits users. Theirs is a money-making venture. And their shareholders expect them to do the best job possible at that. But here’s the thing: It’s nearly 2016, and MS still have not given users the ability to do some pretty basic stuff natively in Excel, such as mash together data in separate sheets or workbooks and serve it up piping hot as a PivotTable. Don’t they know that in the real world, people have to mash together data from different sheets all the time? You get a sheet emailed to you from division A, a sheet from division B, and a sheet from division C. You need to mash it up to get an overview. A lot.

I’m not asking for Tableau here. I’m just asking for a core product that also moves with the times. Or at the very least, keeps up with last century.

I’m working on an application that Project Managers use to test their competencies against a competency framework. There’s a lot of questions and I don’t want to freak them out by showing all at once, so I use Conditional Formatting to unhide the questions in batches, as well as to highlight the next thing that needs to be answered, and to show how their self assessment corresponds to the ratings key.

Here’s how it looks before users start filling it out: only the first batch of questions relating to the first competency area are displayed:
 

 
 
As they complete it, their answers get color-coded to match the key:
 

 
 
When they complete the last question in regards to the current competency they’re working on, the next batch of questions for the next competency appears, and the definition for that competency overwrites the previous one in the top left:
 

 
 

I’m using CF because I don’t want to use code to do this if I can help it, so I don’t have to deal with security settings or questions about enabling macros. Plus I’m just there for 4 weeks, and there isn’t going to be a VBA developer picking up the project after me.

But the CF dialog – how shall I put this delicately – seems as if it was built by Microsoft. (Ok, so I threw tact to the wind there. It’s a dog, a pig, and a slug, all rolled into one needy, dirty, slimy son-of-a-bitch pest.) Here’s all it shows me in all of its non-resizable gory. (Yes, gory, not glory.):
 

 
 
Using it is like trying to build a ship in a bottle inside of another ship in a bottle. Now I know how proctologists feel. If it was half the dialog box that the Name Manager was, it would at least yet you resize so you could see all your conditions at once:
 

 
 
Just look what the Name Manager gives us, by way of comparison:
 

 
The Name Manager gives us friendly names, notes where we can record what does what, resizable columns, and a resizable dialog. Compared to that, the CF dialog is like the punchline from a Monty Python skit.
 

“Oh, we used to dream of having a resizable dialog box.”
 
 
What’s worse, I keep noticing that the order of my CF conditions gets scrambled – maybe when I copy the sheet to a new template, maybe when I insert or delete columns, maybe when I don’t look suitably impressed whenever it does work correctly. I don’t know.

So I thought I’d look for a way to back them up. I looked at Dicks’ posts Listing Format Conditions and Listing Format Conditions Redux, but those would need more work still in order to record the formatting, and then a routine to restore everything from the storage table.

But then I discovered this: If you fire up the macro recorder, bring up the CF dialog box, select Manage Rules, select Show formatting rules for This Worksheet, and then makes some trivial change – such as click the down arrow to move the currently selected CF condition down one, then click the up arrow to put it back:
 

 
 
…then as soon as you push OK the Macro Recorder spits out a macro that clears all the format conditions on the entire sheet, and then builds those CF rules again from scratch. All of them. Here’s an excerpt:


Sub Macro7()
Cells.FormatConditions.Delete
Range("PM[Definition " & Chr(10) & "(Experience)]").Select
Range("G14").Activate
Selection.FormatConditions.Add Type:=xlExpression, Formula1:= _
"=AND(ISBLANK($I14),$T14=FALSE)"
Selection.FormatConditions(Selection.FormatConditions.Count).SetFirstPriority
With Selection.FormatConditions(1).Font
.ThemeColor = xlThemeColorDark1
.TintAndShade = 0
End With
Selection.FormatConditions(1).StopIfTrue = True
Range("PM[Definition " & Chr(10) & "(Knowledge)]").Select
Range("G14").Activate
Selection.FormatConditions.Add Type:=xlExpression, Formula1:= _
"=ISBLANK($G14)"
Selection.FormatConditions(Selection.FormatConditions.Count).SetFirstPriority
With Selection.FormatConditions(1).Interior
.PatternColorIndex = xlAutomatic
.ThemeColor = xlThemeColorDark1
.TintAndShade = 0
End With
Selection.FormatConditions(1).StopIfTrue = True

End Sub

That – my friend – is your CF backup. The only thing wrong with this code is that it keeps putting the line Range(“G14”).Activate in the middle of each block for some strange reason. That happened to be the cell I had selected when I recorded the macro. But if you do a find and replace on the code to ditch it in favor of a more helpful “” then the code works fine. (Yes I know that CF is relative, but that’s still no reason why it should select the cell I have selected and then apply the formatting to it rather than to the desired target). (Edit: You need this activation if you are dealing with CF conditions with relative referencing. But it doesn’t work properly in the event that you originally applied CF to a range while you had another range outside of that CF area selected. The CF manager takes account of this properly, but the macro output doesn’t, meaning it selects a range, then activates a cell/range outside of that selection, which screws things up. So it pays to eyeball the code for situations like this.)

Now what would be cool is if someone out there was to code up a routine that uses extensibility to read this from the VBE and populate a handy table in the worksheet with all the parameters. Extra credit to someone who devises a way to make the macro recorder fire up and do this automatically for each sheet.

Even better: it would be amazing if Microsoft would show the CF dialog the slightest amount of love. CF could be one of the most powerful features of Excel for non coders. But not as it stands at the moment. Right now, it’s a pigdogslug.

An even easier way

So I got to thinking that if Excel will quickly spit out a complete list of FormatConditions at the ‘AppliesTo’ level for the sheet, it must have them stored in a collection somewhere. And that collection is…drum roll please…the Cells object.

Want some code to quickly and easily print out every format condition everywhere? Here ’tis:

Sub FindCF()

'We have to Dim WhatIsIt as a generic Object instead of declaring as FormatCondition because DataBars screw things up.
'See http://excelmatters.com/2015/03/04/when-is-a-formatcondition-not-a-formatcondition/

Dim WhatIsIt As Object
Dim fc As FormatCondition
Dim db As Databar
Dim cs As ColorScale
Dim ics As IconSetCondition

Dim ws As Worksheet
For Each ws In ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets
For Each WhatIsIt In ws.Cells.FormatConditions
Select Case TypeName(WhatIsIt)
Case "Databar":
Set db = WhatIsIt
Debug.Print "Type: " & "DataBar" & vbTab & "Applies To: " & db.AppliesTo.Address
Case "FormatCondition"
Set fc = WhatIsIt
Debug.Print "Type: " & "FormatCondition" & vbTab & "Applies To: " & fc.AppliesTo.Address & vbTab & "Formula: " & fc.Formula1
Case "ColorScale"
Set cs = WhatIsIt
Debug.Print "Type: " & "ColorScale" & vbTab & "Applies To: " & cs.AppliesTo.Address
Case "IconSetCondition"
Set ics = WhatIsIt
Debug.Print "Type: " & "IconSet" & vbTab & "Applies To: " & ics.AppliesTo.Address
Case Else
Stop
End Select
Next WhatIsIt
Next ws
End Sub


Code? Luxury!

So here’s something I came across today. Somehow I’d managed to set up both local AND global names in a sheet, and found that I pretty much couldn’t do anything with the Global name via VBA as a result.

Say I set up this global name:
 

 
 
Note that it says SomeName in the NameBox when I have the name selected. Nothing weird about that.

Now I add a local name with the same name, pointing to A2:
 

 
 
…and here you can see both names in the Name Manager. Note that it says SomeName in the NameBox when I have the local name selected. Nothing weird about that, either…local names take precedence over global.
 

 
 
If I type = then select A1 where the global name lives, note that no name comes up in the intellisense:
 

 
 
..but if I do the same with the local name, I get intellisense:
 

 
 
Now things get a little weirder. If I type =SomeName, I get two options in the intellisense:
 

 
 
If I select the SomeName (Workbook) option, Excel qualifies the reference with the workbook name:
 

 
 
…but when I push Enter, it’s still the local name that’s being referenced:
 

 
 
…and when I select it again, I see that Excel has bizarrely changed that Book1! qualifier to a Sheet1! qualifier. In other words, it’s said ‘I know you asked for workbook, but I’m giving you local’:
 

 
 
So what the hell is the point of those two options in the intellisense, if no matter what you do, Excel gives you the local name? Beats me. What’s worse, if your workbook name has a space in it, then Excel forgets to wrap apostrophes around it, and the Update Values dialog comes up:
 

 
 
What a mess. Push cancel, and you’re left with an invalid name:
 

 
 

Names and Collections

It turns out that the local name gets added to both the ActiveWorkbook.Names collection AND the ActiveSheet.Names Collection:
? activeworkbook.Names.Count
2
? activesheet.names.count
1

You can reference both names by index number just fine:
? activeworkbook.Names(1).Name
Sheet1!SomeName
? activeworkbook.Names(2).Name
SomeName

…but any attempt to reference the globally scoped one by name gives you the local name. Here, I retrieve their names from their index numbers:
? activeworkbook.Names(1).Name
Sheet1!SomeName
? activeworkbook.Names(2).Name
SomeName

Here I retrieve their refersto ranges from those index numbers:
? activeworkbook.Names(1).RefersTo
=Sheet1!$A$2
? activeworkbook.Names(2).RefersTo
=Sheet1!$A$1

Here I try to retrieve their refersto ranges from their names:
? activeworkbook.Names(“Sheet1!SomeName”).RefersTo
=Sheet1!$A$2
? activeworkbook.Names(“SomeName”).RefersTo
=Sheet1!$A$2

And here I try to retrieve their names from their names:
? activeworkbook.Names(“Sheet1!SomeName”).Name
Sheet1!SomeName
? activeworkbook.Names(“SomeName”).Name
Sheet1!SomeName

As per this Stack Overflow thread, If you want to identify the global one, you have to loop through the collection of names and find the one that has an “!” in its name.

So there you have it: if you’re referencing names by name, don’t assume you’ll get the one you want. Tedious!

Here’s a funny little bug I came across today. So I’m adding a CF condition, and I push F3 to bring up Paste Names rather than type out a reference or name:
 

 
 
And clicking on that named range duly inserts it into my CF formula:
 

 
 
…but the only problem is, now I can’t seem to do anything else. I can’t type the closing bracket, because Excel won’t let me. I can’t backspace to remove the offending name, because Excel won’t let me. The cursor is still flashing, so Excel hasn’t hung.

If you type the name in manually rather than using F3, it works perfectly. It turns out its some kind of focus issue: if you push ALT + TAB the screen flickers, but you still have the Conditional Format dialog open and now it works perfectly.

It’s incredible what you can do with CF if you’ve got a good memory. The good memory bit is required because CF doesn’t let you write notes about what each condition does like Names do, or even assign those CF conditions meaningful names. Let alone (heaven forbid) resize the dialog box so you can see all your rules at once, to help you work out which does what:
 

 
 
With a good memory, it’s an incredibly strong and useful tool. With my memory, it’s downright mysterious.

Shame, because I’m using it to really good effect to steer users through a pretty complicated self-assessment tool. I pity the poor sap that comes after me that has to amend these rules. On the other hand, that poor sap will probably end up hiring me back at my urgent pickle rate. Thanks, Microsoft.

I was writing up the CellAbove trick for the book. You know, the trick outlined at Ken Puls’ place.

First I was going to show how SUM doesn’t handle row insertions immediately above the SUM function itself. So I duly made up a crappy example (if you’ll pardon the crappy pun):
 

 
 
…and then did the screenshot of the row insert, that showed how the formula didn’t adjust:
 

 
 
…and then went to add some ridiculously large number of underwear, for readers who need some point laboring:
 

 
 
…and then pushed enter, and to my amazement saw that my example of “broken” ain’t, no more:
 

 
 
How utterly inconsiderate of Microsoft to fix this. Ruined a perfectly good example that I figure I could have dragged out for another half a chapter. Bugger! Now I have to write something else. God I hope they don’t fix the CONCATENATE function before I finish the book, or I’m screwed.
 
 

Edit

I just heard from Bill Jelen, who mentions when this gets autocorrected in this really great podcast of his:

He says “Going back to Excel 2003, provided you have a series of three or more numbers, Excel’s going to rewrite the formula to handle the new rows”.

But do check out that link: It’s hilarious. Also check out the follow-up podcasts.

There’s nothing like an Excel nerd with too much time on his hands…

In my last post, I looked at how much faster the Double VLOOKUP trick was on sorted data compared with the usual linear VLOOKUP on unsorted data.

Below is the code for the timing routine I use. I stole the guts of it from joeu2004 who made some incredibly insightful comments at this great thread at MrExcel

If you’re going to time formulas, then that thread is required reading, because it makes this important point: we cannot always accurately measure the performance of a formula simply by measuring one instance of it. (But that does depend on the nature of the formula and the situation that we are trying to measure. Sometimes we need to measure one instance of a formula, but increase the size of ranges that it references in order to overcome the effects of overhead.)

I’ve assigned my code to a custom button in the ribbon. You just select the cells you want the formula to time, and click the button. (By the way, my upcoming book not only shows you how to do this, but also gives you routines for every one of the icons shown above and a lot more besides.)
 

 
 
In the above case, I’ve selected a 1 row by 3 column range. If your selection is only one row deep – and there’s more rows with data below – then the app assumes you want to time everything below too, up to the first blank cell it encounters. I may want to rethink that, but it works good for now.

And after I click the magic button, here’s the result:
 

 
 
As you can see from the output screenshot above, it puts a new table in a new sheet, populates it with your timings and relevant parameters, and then displays a message with joeu2004’s warning in it. Plus – and I think this is the genius part – it lets you push OK to return back to the sheet where the original formulas are, or push Cancel if you want to stay in the output sheet.

Note the ‘Formula’ column in the output table. For now, it just lists the formula that was in the top-left cell in the user’s selection. I think listing multiple formulas would be overkill. If there’s no formula in the top left cell, it sees if there’s a formula in the cell below. That way you can select headers in a Table, and you’ll still get the formula in the output.

It also can time multiple areas in one pass. So if I select that same range as a non-contiguous selection by holding Ctrl down and clicking each cell as I’ve done here (not that it’s easy to tell the difference visually from the previous screenshot):
 

 
 
…then here’s what I get:
 

 
 
Man, that is sooo much better than having to do each formula separately and then having to manually copy the results from a messagebox into a Table, like I used to do.

As you can see, I put a a databar on the important column, so you can visually eyeball results instead of conceptually juggling scientific notation in your head. But I’m damned if I can get this to display exactly as I want via VBA. For instance, here’s the databars I want if I add them manually:

Notice that those have nice borders, and sensible setting for the minimum values, meaning that first result also gets a databar. The code that VBA spits out when you add this default databar is pretty ugly:

Selection.FormatConditions.AddDatabar
Selection.FormatConditions(Selection.FormatConditions.Count).ShowValue = True
Selection.FormatConditions(Selection.FormatConditions.Count).SetFirstPriority
With Selection.FormatConditions(1)
.MinPoint.Modify newtype:=xlConditionValueAutomaticMin
.MaxPoint.Modify newtype:=xlConditionValueAutomaticMax
End With
With Selection.FormatConditions(1).BarColor
.Color = 13012579
.TintAndShade = 0
End With
Selection.FormatConditions(1).BarFillType = xlDataBarFillGradient
Selection.FormatConditions(1).Direction = xlContext
Selection.FormatConditions(1).NegativeBarFormat.ColorType = xlDataBarColor
Selection.FormatConditions(1).BarBorder.Type = xlDataBarBorderSolid
Selection.FormatConditions(1).NegativeBarFormat.BorderColorType = _
xlDataBarColor
With Selection.FormatConditions(1).BarBorder.Color
.Color = 13012579
.TintAndShade = 0
End With
Selection.FormatConditions(1).AxisPosition = xlDataBarAxisAutomatic
With Selection.FormatConditions(1).AxisColor
.Color = 0
.TintAndShade = 0
End With
With Selection.FormatConditions(1).NegativeBarFormat.Color
.Color = 255
.TintAndShade = 0
End With
With Selection.FormatConditions(1).NegativeBarFormat.BorderColor
.Color = 255
.TintAndShade = 0
End With


My code is just doing the first line:

'Add DataBars to the Each Cell column for easier comparison
lo.ListColumns("Each Cell (sec)").Range.FormatConditions.AddDatabar


…because no matter what I try, doing anything beyond merely adding the bars causes the code to error out. For instance, even if I just try and set the minpoint and maxpoint I get an error:
 

 
 
…and this successfully adds the min setting I want, but errors out when I try to add a listrow:
 

 
 
Even worse, when I end the routine, the screen no longer updates no matter what I do. So I have to close out of Excel entirely.

If anyone can tell me where I’m going wrong, I’d be much obliged. Might be another peculiarity of Excel Tables. Meanwhile, I’ll just run with those simple bars.

Here’s my draft code:

Option Explicit

Public Declare Function QueryPerformanceFrequency Lib "kernel32" _
(ByRef freq As Currency) As Long
Public Declare Function QueryPerformanceCounter Lib "kernel32" _
(ByRef cnt As Currency) As Long

'Code adapted from http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/excel-questions/762910-speed-performance-measure-visual-basic-applications-function.html
' Description: Determines formusa execution time
' Programmer: Jeff Weir
' Contact: excelforsuperheroes@gmail.com

' Name/Version: Date: Ini: Modification:
' TimeFormula 20150426 JSW Added in ability to record times to ListObject

Sub TimeFormula()
Dim sc As Currency
Dim ec As Currency
Dim dt As Double
Dim sMsg As String
Dim sResults As String
Dim i As Long
Dim N As Long
Dim oldCalc As Variant
Dim myRng As Range
Dim lo As ListObject
Dim lr As ListRow
Dim bUnique As Boolean
Dim strFormula As String
Dim myArea As Range
Dim lngArea As Long
Dim ws As Worksheet
Dim wsOriginal As Worksheet
Dim bNewListObject As Boolean
Dim lngAreas As Long
Dim varResults As Variant
Dim varMsg As Variant
Dim fc As FormatCondition

Const passes As Long = 10

With Application
.ScreenUpdating = False
.EnableEvents = False
oldCalc = .Calculation
.Calculation = xlCalculationManual
End With

Set myArea = Selection
lngAreas = myArea.Areas.Count
Set wsOriginal = myArea.Worksheet
ReDim varResults(1 To lngAreas, 1 To 6)
For Each myArea In Selection.Areas
lngArea = lngArea + 1
dt = 0
Set myRng = myArea
If myRng.Rows.Count = 1 Then
If Not IsEmpty(myRng.Cells(1).Offset(1)) Then Set myRng = Range(myRng, myRng.End(xlDown))
End If
N = myRng.Count
If myRng.Cells.Count > 1 Then
'Get formula from 2nd row in case we're dealing with multiple cells and happen to be on a header
If myRng.Cells(2).HasFormula Then strFormula = myRng.Cells(1).Formula
If myRng.Cells(2).HasArray Then strFormula = myRng.Cells(1).HasArray
End If

If myRng.Cells(1).HasFormula Then strFormula = myRng.Cells(1).Formula
If myRng.Cells(1).HasArray Then strFormula = myRng.Cells(1).HasArray

With myRng
For i = 1 To passes
sc = myTimer
.Calculate
ec = myTimer
dt = dt + myElapsedTime(ec - sc)
Next

'Record results for this pass
varResults(lngArea, 1) = myRng.Address
If strFormula <> "" Then varResults(lngArea, 2) = "'" & strFormula
varResults(lngArea, 3) = N
varResults(lngArea, 4) = dt / passes
varResults(lngArea, 5) = dt / N / passes
varResults(lngArea, 6) = Now
End With

Next

bNewListObject = True
For Each ws In ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets
For Each lo In ws.ListObjects
If lo.Name = "appTimeFormulas" Then
bNewListObject = False
ws.Activate
Exit For
End If
Next
Next

If bNewListObject Then
Set ws = ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets.Add
On Error Resume Next
ws.Name = "TimeFormula"
On Error GoTo 0
Range("A1").Value = "Range"
Range("B1").Value = "Formula"
Range("C1").Value = "Count"
Range("D1").Value = "Entire Range (sec)"
Range("E1").Value = "Each Cell (sec)"
Range("F1").Value = "TimeStamp"
Set lo = ws.ListObjects.Add(xlSrcRange, Range("A1").CurrentRegion, , xlYes)
lo.Name = "appTimeFormulas"

'Add DataBars to the Each Cell column for easier comparison
lo.ListColumns("Each Cell (sec)").Range.FormatConditions.AddDatabar

Else: Set lo = ActiveSheet.ListObjects("appTimeFormulas")
End If

Set lr = lo.ListRows.Add
lr.Range.Resize(lngAreas).Value = varResults
lo.Range.EntireColumn.AutoFit
With lo.ListColumns("Formula").Range
If .ColumnWidth > 30 Then
.ColumnWidth = 30
.WrapText = True
End If
End With

With Application
.EnableEvents = True
.Calculation = oldCalc
.ScreenUpdating = True
End With

sMsg = "Here are the average timings for the selected range over " & passes & " passes "
sMsg = sMsg & vbNewLine & vbNewLine
sMsg = sMsg & "Note that timings include some overhead incurred during the actual measurement process itself. "
sMsg = sMsg & "So if the functions you are tring to time are really really fast, then it's possible that "
sMsg = sMsg & "the measurement time included in the above result dwarfs the "
sMsg = sMsg & "actual recalculation time of the formulas themselves."
sMsg = sMsg & vbNewLine & vbNewLine
sMsg = sMsg & "For best results, either time the functions over a really big range (hundreds "
sMsg = sMsg & "of rows or more) or increase the size of the ranges that the formulas "
sMsg = sMsg & "refer to. Furthermore, pay more heed to the average per-formula time than the overall time when "
sMsg = sMsg & "making comparisons with other formulas."
sMsg = sMsg & vbNewLine & vbNewLine
sMsg = sMsg & "Do you want to return to the formulas, or stay in the result sheet?"
sMsg = sMsg & vbNewLine & vbNewLine
sMsg = sMsg & "(Press YES to return to formulas, and NO to stay in this results sheet.)"

varMsg = MsgBox(Prompt:=sMsg, Title:="Recalculation time for selection:", Buttons:=vbYesNo)
If varMsg = vbYes Then wsOriginal.Activate

End Sub

Function myTimer() As Currency
' defer conversion to seconds until myElapsedTime
QueryPerformanceCounter myTimer
End Function

Function myElapsedTime(dc As Currency) As Double ' return seconds
Static df As Double
Dim freq As Currency
If df = 0 Then QueryPerformanceFrequency freq: df = freq
myElapsedTime = dc / df
End Function