ntools – a VBA/Excel tool collection

ntools – a VBA/Excel tool collection

For many years, Excel had the least functional duplicate remover function you could think of. Which is strange, because duplicates are a nemesis encountered pretty much daily when dealing with human-generarted data. For this reasons, a good frind of mine wrote a better duplicate remover tool for Excel back in 2004. I re-wrote the whole tool later around 2011, to familiarize myself with VBA, and because I once more needed a powerful duplicate remover. Thsi was the beginning of the ntools collection.

Over the years, many small functiosn were added, such as a functionality to insert 10 rows at once – still my most favourite tool. I is one line of code that may have saved me hours of clicking…

In 2021, I added a another complex and sophisticated tool: „Match and Assign“. The use case was that we frequently needed abstract submissions to reviewers, but with certain criteria. For exampler, submitter and reviewer needed to have the same scientific background and specialization, but they could not work for the same university; and more criteria of this type. These kind of optimization problems are of a class of problems where it cannot be guaranteed that an optimal solution can be found (within a acceptable amount of time), so you have to try to at least get close to an optimum. Furthermore, this tool also has fuzzy matching, which is also a fun thing to do, but it is also computationally heavy, if you only have VBA available.

Task

sophisticated problems with VBA