That's why it's good to be familiar with various APIs: programmatic access allows the automation of the repetitive tasks. Sometimes you can save yourself from lots of grunt work (and/or save time). I have "always delegate to the machine what it can do" or ingrained in my value system.
I added around 50 checkboxes to an excel sheet quickly for some ad-hoc required document (that also could have been automated :). I just copied and pasted and the list of checkboxes ended up having a misaligned list as you can see in the following screenshot.
I was hoping I'll find an "align lefts" feature that will automatically align the lefts of all the shapes. Nope. Someone from the office cuckled: "do it one by one", knowing that this is one extraordinarily mundane task. I said to myself: Nope.
I immediately decided to write up something that will adjust them for me. It should be and it was trivial. The following piece of code for a Visual Studio Excel Addin project was a one minute task. Debug. Run. Mission accomplished without losing my vision.
I added around 50 checkboxes to an excel sheet quickly for some ad-hoc required document (that also could have been automated :). I just copied and pasted and the list of checkboxes ended up having a misaligned list as you can see in the following screenshot.
I was hoping I'll find an "align lefts" feature that will automatically align the lefts of all the shapes. Nope. Someone from the office cuckled: "do it one by one", knowing that this is one extraordinarily mundane task. I said to myself: Nope.
I immediately decided to write up something that will adjust them for me. It should be and it was trivial. The following piece of code for a Visual Studio Excel Addin project was a one minute task. Debug. Run. Mission accomplished without losing my vision.
private void button1_Click(object sender, RibbonControlEventArgs e)
{
var shapes = ThisAddIn.ApplicationInstance.ActiveSheet.Shapes as Excel.Shapes;
float firstLeft = -123; //magic
for (var i = 1; i <= shapes.Count; i++)
{
var item = shapes.Item(i);
if (firstLeft == -123)
{
firstLeft = item.Left;
}
item.Left = firstLeft;
}
}
Tada! The check boxes are aligned. You can add more calculations to improve the layout by spreading the items vertically or even into a grid. You can do whatever you want depending on what you need.
