Macros represent short programs that the user mostly does not write, but are automatically generated by Excel. Their role is to automate frequently used procedures, and more ambitious users can use them to develop applications with the powerful Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language. In this way there are almost no things that can’t be done in Excel, so it becomes a development platform.
Importing a table from the Internet is a useful Excel option that came at the wrong time. Sometimes, when web designers created pages using the TABLE structure, the tabular data was in the tables (where they should be). Today, the approach to making web sites has changed, so DIV tags are used to display tabular data, which for some reason can not be recognized by Excel. Hence this option has limited application capability.
Although Excel is the best software to work with tables, we often create them in other software. Also, tables are commonly used for data exchange, when they are exported as tables in a text file as “Comma Separated Values”. In this file, each row of the table is a separate line in the text, and the values that are in the columns are separated by commas (hence the name). In the text that follows, we will show how to import text from one such file …
When entering the parameters of a calculation, it is useful when we can check that the correct values are entered. This type of control serves to check whether a good type of data is entered, whether the values are in the reference range, and can be used to help when entering data into a table. In this way, Excel can also be used as a tool for completing a questionnaire with predefined answers.
When retreiving data from another application or their mass input, especially when done by more people, occurrence of repeated values is a common thing. If it’s a small amount of data, we’ll probably be able to manually remove them. However, when reviewing large tables, we can also use the Excel option that allows you to find and remove duplicates based on one or more criteria.