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Re: RE: st: Appending several excel data sets into one


From   "Michael Blasnik" <[email protected]>
To   <[email protected]>
Subject   Re: RE: st: Appending several excel data sets into one
Date   Mon, 17 Sep 2007 10:26:40 -0400


I agree that the suggestion to purchase some separate product to alter the xls files when the same task can be easily automated in Excel is silly, but it's also silly to try to write VBA code in Excel and launch it through a Stata do file when everything can be done within Stata directly. The Excel VBA route would certainly make it more difficult to produce documented and reproducible results, especially if you want to be able to send your do file to someone else and have them reproduce it.

Michael Blasnik

----- Original Message ----- From: "Sergiy Radyakin" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2007 10:14 AM
Subject: Re: RE: st: Appending several excel data sets into one



Here is a quote from Mr. Coveney

"If workbooks contain multiple sheets, you would like to access the sheet
names.  Excel doesn't provide this facility, but an add-in called
ASAP-utilities http://www.asap-utilities.com/ includes one to create an
index sheet listing all sheets in the workbook. "

And this is exactly where my comment was pointed to (index sheet).
Otherwise I would have posted a VBA code that appends 200 sheets together.

The quoted utilities package actually retails for $49! What a deal!
(after having a look at what the utilities actually do, e.g. "Displays
the filename in the titlebar" or "Close all saved files" I think that
the code of each of those utilities is no longer than 5-10 lines).

If we go the "external way", why don't we just buy software to append
Excel sheets? Just google it and take the first best (in my case
Google came up with
http://www.office-excel.com/excel-addins/tables-transformer.html for
39$, which claims to be able to append Excel sheets. I honestly have
no clue on what it does and how it does it, but it looks more adequate
than the utilities suggested above.) The second-best DigDB provides a
price comparison of the similar tools, which might be useful for other
users: http://www.digdb.com/purchase/ but I feel a pain to pay $50 for
10 lines of code (feels like having to buy .ado files -- something
unheard of). It might take 5 more minutes to find a ready snippet on
the web.

As for reproducibility of the results, you can execute VBA code from
the same Stata do file. I do not see a problem here (it does not look
elegant, though).

Best regards,
    Sergiy Radyakin

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