Name manager 2.1 released (97, 2000, XP)

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Matthew Henson (mhenson@mac.com) who ensured the utility works on Mac Excel too.

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Now, that is good news. I use Excel 2002 at work, but Excel 2001 on a Mac at home. Thank you

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(Edited by Leif on 13-Mar-04 17:09. to update link to http://www.bmsltd.ie/)

Hi All,

Here’s to announce I’ve just released a new version of the Name manager utility.

Find it at http://www.bmsltd.ie/mvp%5B/url%5D

Description:

If you are in need of a utility to manage defined names in your workbooks, this one is a must-have. List all names in your active workbook. Filter them using 13 filters, e.g. “With external references”, “With errors”, Hidden, Visible. Show just names that contain a substring. Show just names unused in worksheet cells. Edit them in a simple dialog or make a list, edit the list and update all names in one go. Delete, hide, unhide selected names with a single mouse click.
Now available: version 2.1 of the name manager, created in collaboration with Charles Williams, http://www.decisionmodels.com and Matthew Henson (mhenson@mac.com) who ensured the utility works on Mac Excel too.
Quite some new features have been added!!!

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Jan Karel, your Name Manager is fantastic! I just inherited a bunch of templates for data collection that expected everything to be the same size and in the same place, so there are a lot of named ranges. Now, they have different information in the header and the instrument running at a different resolution, so most all of the named input ranges are in the wrong place and are the wrong size. “Just a few changes” and it will work with the new data! Wrong! without your Name Manager, it would be .

One simple request, make the List button use the filtered list so you could printout the unused names. One hard request for the wish list, even a simple finder for VBA use of names would be wonderful. Simple being defined as just finding RANGE(“xxx”), where xxx is a Name. Thanks again! –Sam

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use the filtered list so you could printout the unused names

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Good idea.
I’ll put this on the wish list for a future version.

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One hard request for the wish list, even a simple finder for VBA use of names would be wonderful.

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We’ve thought about that. Another one for the list I guess. But there is also the many objects to search in, if we really want to know whether a name is not used…

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But there is also the many objects to search in, if we really want to know whether a name is not used…

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It’s just a simple matter of writing a VBA code parser.

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If you’re adding to your future fix list …. how about adding a ‘select all’ in the With Errors list so I can delete all names with errors in them at once instead of pushing Delete 100 times. I had inherited a workbook with 128 names with errors (out of total of 338) and used NamesManager to get rid of them.

I did get an error once when I tried to view the contents of a name… I’ll test it more and get back with you on how/when it occurs.

Good job!
Deb

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No fix needed. If you press the multi button, you are enabled to select (control or shift-click or drag) one or more names in the (filtered) list and hide, unhide or delete them all in one go.

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This is a really useful utility and has already saved me quite a lot of work.
Thank you for making it available.

One small problem I have found is when filtering for unused names, the utility does not recognise names that are used in the Data Validation function where the validation source is a list having a defined name.
Another potential addtion to the wish list maybe?

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Yes, I would really like to add that, but where would I stop:

– formula property of a picture
– source range of pivot tables
– source range of charts
– formula property of chart titles
– objects positioned on charts with a formula
– comboboxes on sheets
– listboxes
– spinner controls
– …..

And there are more, I’m sure.

It would indeed be useful, but the effort to build this is tremendous. The time it would take would be equally impressive

What I would advise is to download FINDLINK.ZIP from the Excel MVP Page listed below and use that to search for a suspicious name in (nearly) all objects of a workbook. Only drawback is that it only searches one name at the time.

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> where would I stop
Don’t stop, we love it!

One for the wish list:
I usually only want to know if a particular Name is used. Now, I have to filter the entire list to show unused names.

Thanks again for a very useful tool! I am using it constantly since I am not the author of the books that I am modifying.

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