How can I make this Excel macro loop through only visible filtered data?

Question

I have very little experience with VBA and I'm now stumped by what I'm trying to accomplish with a macro. Excel 2010.

I have 3 relevant columns. B, C, and AD. (Columns 2, 3, and 30) My data is filtered down to about 30 rows, almost none of which are contiguous (about 500 rows total).

I want the following to happen:

A formula is entered in ONLY THE VISIBLE ROWS in column AD, which will look at the value in column B of that same row and check for that value in all of the VISIBLE CELLS in column C. It cannot look at all of the cells in column C, only the visible ones.

If the value from column B in that row is found anywhere in the VISIBLE CELLS in column C, then "True" should be returned in column AD. I don't care about what is returned when the value is not found, as I will be filtering for the "True" values only. As an added requirement, if the first 3 characters of the value in column B are "010" I need it to return a value of "True" in column AD. I then need this formula copied down column AD for each VISIBLE row.

Right now, I have a formula that will conduct the search in column C for the value in column B. (found on stackoverflow)

=NOT(ISNA(VLOOKUP(B4,C:C,1,0))))

This provides a "True" in column AD when the value from column B is found somewhere in column C. With the "010" constraint, the formula looks like this:

=IF(LEFT(B4,3)="010","True",NOT(ISNA(VLOOKUP(B4,C:C,1,0))))

I am having a problem in that this looks at even the hidden (filtered out) rows. Every one of my values in column B will appear in column C at some point, so I'm only getting "True" for all my entries.

I think there must be a better way to do this than just having a macro paste the formula down (even considering I can't get the formula to work). So, 2 questions:

1. Is the formula the right way to go in this case, and, if so, can anyone tell me how to get it to only search the visible cells in column C?
2. If code is the best way (I'm guessing it is), can anyone show me an example of code that might work?

Answer 1

You're almost there. On its own, COUNTIF does not have this capability, but if you throw user-defined functions (UDF functions) into the mix, you have an elegant solution.

Add the following code to a module in your code-behind.

Function Vis(Rin As Range) As Range
    'Returns the subset of Rin that is visible
    Dim Cell As Range
    Application.Volatile
    Set Vis = Nothing
    For Each Cell In Rin
        If Not (Cell.EntireRow.Hidden Or Cell.EntireColumn.Hidden) Then
            If Vis Is Nothing Then
                Set Vis = Cell
            Else
                Set Vis = Union(Vis, Cell)
            End If
        End If
    Next Cell

End Function


Function COUNTIFv(Rin As Range, Condition As Variant) As Long
    'Same as Excel COUNTIF worksheet function, except does not count
    'cells that are hidden
    Dim A As Range
    Dim Csum As Long
    Csum = 0

    For Each A In Vis(Rin).Areas
        Csum = Csum + WorksheetFunction.CountIf(A, Condition)
    Next A

    COUNTIFv = Csum
End Function

Now you can use the new COUNTIFv() function to do the same as count, but only include visible cells. This code example was sampled from Damon Ostrander's answer to a similar question , so you will probably need to tweak it slightly. You can either use the COUNTIFv function in the macro itself, or modify the VLOOKUP function in a similar fashion to use the worksheet function example you have already. Neither method is really better than the other, so either should work for you.