An MSForms Treeview 2: Ready for beta testing

Hi everyone,

Some time ago I announced I was working on “An MSForms Treeview” replacing the Common Controls Treeview with an all-VBA counterpart.

This home-made treeview control will work on any Office version as of Office 2000, including 32 and 64 bit Office. I expect it will even work on MAC Office, but I’m still waiting for test results.

Peter Thornton (thank you Peter!) jumped in on the project enthusiastically and really made a difference adding all sorts of usefull stuff and optimising the code for performance.

Now we’re ready for beta testing.

Please visit this page of my website for a description of the control and a download file which includes a demo userform implementing the treeview classes we built:

An MSForms (all VBA) treeview

Tell us what you think of it (oh, and please report bugs too!).

Regards,

Jan Karel Pieterse
www.jkp-ads.com

An MSForms Treeview

If you have ever used the Treeview control from the “Additional controls” section, then you know what a versatile control this is to show hierarchically organized data.

There are a couple of problems with this Treeview control:

  1. Compile errors due to a difference in how the control libraries are registered in 32 bits Windows’ System32 and 64 bit Windows’ SysWOW32 folders. If you distribute a file that was saved in 64 bit Windows, containing one of the “Microsoft Windows Common Controls 6.0” (The Treeview control is one of them) and with the reference set to “mscomctl.ocx”, people using 32 bit Windows will almost certainly have problems. At best it could entail removing both the control and the reference and replacing both, but at worst the user’s Excel can crash when trying to load the file and run the app.
  2. The standard Treeview control, like all non built-in ActiveX controls, cannot be used in 64 bit versions of Office.

Especially the second point convinced me it is time to develop a custom-made Treeview “control”, that only uses the native Office forms controls. I started building this a couple of weeks ago and after some time I tricked Peter Thornton into helping me with it :-)

The screenshot below shows both our new Treeview (left) and the Windows one (right) side-by-side:

Not bad, right?

Both Treeviews allow for checkboxes:

And both allow icons (windows Treeview not shown here):

You can also edit a node:

And expand and collapse nodes and navigate the tree using your arrow keys.

We built the custom Treeview using just two class modules. Using it in your project will require nothing more than copying the two classes and adding a bit of plumbing to your userform: some code and an empty frame which will hold the Treeview and possibly a frame with pictures for the icons.

We’re currently doing some cleaning up (like removing obsolete debugging stuff, adding comments and the like), so the “control” is not quite ready to be released to the outside world. Keep an eye on this blog, once we’re done we’ll post here.

Well, what do you think, is this useful or what? What functionality would be critical for you? Let us know!

Regards,

Jan Karel Pieterse

Excel 2013, SDI and modeless userforms

Hi Everyone,

With Excel 2013 we also got new document windowing in Excel; Microsoft decided to make Excel behave the same as Word:

from MDI:

Excel 2010 MDI interface showing two workbooks
The Excel 2010 MDI interface

to SDI:

Excel 2013 SDI interface showing two workbooks
The new SDI interface of Excel 2013

This causes havoc when one shows a modeless userform which should stay on top of all Excel windows:

Excel 2013 SDI can cause a userform to disappear
Excel 2013 SDI can cause a userform to disappear

I’ve devised a way to prevent this problem and written an article about how this was done.

Enjoy!

Regards,

Jan Karel Pieterse

www.jkp-ads.com

 

 

 

Working With Circular references in Excel

Have you ever experienced the dreaded “Circular reference warning” popping up when you opened an Excel file or entered a formula?

Excel detects a circular reference when a chain of calculations visits the same cell more than once. Many users get (very) confused by this message and have no idea what it is about. I’ll tried to demystify that message in a new article:

Working with Circular references in Excel

The article contains these chapters:

Types of circular references

Simplistically speaking there are only a few types of circular references to discern:

Deliberate circular references

Accidental circular references

Calculation settings

If you want to work with circular references, the calculation settings of Excel are very important. This page gives you some pointers!

Properly setting up circular references

Whereas I am no fan of using circular references, they can be beneficial to your model and really solve the problem you are trying to solve. So here is some advice on how to properly work with them.

Reasons why circular references may not be detected

This page shows a couple of reasons why circles are not detected.

Enjoy!

Regards,

Jan Karel Pieterse

www.jkp-ads.com

Fitting curves to your data using least squares

Introduction

If you’re an engineer (like I used to be in a previous life), you have probably done your bit of experimenting. Usually, you then need a way to fit your measurement results with a curve. If you’re a proper engineer, you also have some idea what type of equation should theoretically fit your data.

Perhaps you did some measurements with results like this:

Data with fitted equation

I’ve created an Excel file with which you can fit curves to your data, check out the article on my website:

Fitting curves to your data using Least Squares

Enjoy!

Regards,

Jan Karel Pieterse

http://www.jkp-ads.com/

Embedding Excel Web App objects in your web page

Hi everyone!

As you may have seen on some blogs, Microsoft now enables you to include any Excel file -or parts thereof- in your web pages and blog posts.

For example (yes you can make changes to the cells, they are not retained):

I have written an article that explains how this is done.

Even more: I have also created a demo where you can enter information in a web form (a textbox), which in turn updates information in the embedded Excel web app file.

Enjoy the read: Embedding Excel files on your website

Regards,

Jan Karel Pieterse
www.jkp-ads.com