Excel Add-ins, Advanced Excel Tips

DigDB

Add-in Tools for Excel Elites
Who else wants to do a 10-hour Excel analysis in 15 minutes? (more ...)

Features | Testimonial | Download ^{free 15-day trial} | Purchase | FAQ | Contact

Common Usage Errors

Blank rows in a table
When you use DigDB to work on tables, for example, to filter, match, dedupe, or join (merge), if the result is obviously wrong, you should check first to see if there are blank rows in your table. A table (or list), by definition, cannot have blank rows in it.
If you start the operation by clicking one cell in your table area, then DigDB will automatically select all the neighboring area of that cell, this is equivalent of doing a Ctrl+Alt+* (select the current cell's neighboring area). Often, in a long table, the blank row may appear deep in the middle. Therefore, even though apparently the table is selected, the selection may have stopped at row 3,456 thus leaving out the rest 4000 rows.
Sometimes a table obviously contains blank. But users don't know how to operate on them, they ask us why aren't the entire table area selected when they invoke the commands.
The simple answer is that all blank rows needs to be deleted before doing any DigDB table operations. DigDB has a function that allows you to easily delete blank rows. You should use this function when you are not sure if a long table contains blank rows. You can select the entire area manually, then invoke this command, this command will tell you how many blank rows are there, and let you delete them if you want.
Spaces in cells
Sometimes, DigDB's filter or table match seems to miss the cells that are obviously matched. The reason could be that there are spaces in the two seemingly matched cells. 'ABC' look the same as 'ABC ' on a sheet, but they have different values. Therefore, if you filter by 'ABC', or match two columns, these two values are not filtered or matched.
To get rid of the spaces, you can use DigDB trim function to trim a selected area, or an entire column. After the trim, you can be sure that there is no missed matches.
Filter not working
The most common usage error in DigDB filtering is being unable to select the columns correctly. When users add a criteria, often they forget to use the dropdown to select the column. So, if the criteria is 'Col1 > 5 and Col2 < 2', it may end up being selected as 'Col1 > 5 and Col1 < 2', which will not produce any result obviously.

Related keywords: Advanced excel tips, excel questions tools, Excel reporting applications, Excel add-ins add-in, Excel shareware, Excel plugin plug-ins plugins, Excel tricks question, Excel utility utilities, Excel add-on add-ons, Excel tip tips, Power excel technique, Excel manipluation, Excel guru, Excel trick, Excel toolkit, Excel app power user

Microsoft and the Office logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of
Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

Common Usage Errors

Blank rows in a table

Spaces in cells

Filter not working