Who uses Personal.xls?

[HalfAce]

Yep, pretty much like Smitty & Dom too.
Basically things like routines to enable events or reset command bars and such that may be left in an undesirable state when some code bugs out.

But other than that I don't use it much.

 

[Darren Bartrup]

I did use it to store a list of postcodes in my county along with the districts and area's those postcodes are in working on addresses.

I thought it would be easier to direct people on how to update this list rather than a list in an add-in.

Turns out I couldn't trust any of them to do anything so had to write code to do it for them.

 

[Rekd]

I thought it would be easier to direct people on how to update this list rather than a list in an add-in.

Turns out I couldn't trust any of them to do anything so had to write code to do it for them.

This!

 

[bertie]

I have never used it. In all honesty up until about six months ago I never knew personal.xls existed. It was only through browsing posts on this forum I became aware of it. Even then I thought it was new functionality with Excel 2007.

For code which can be categorised I organise in local html files for easy access. This allows me greater scope to comment how the code was built up. Other codes, which are based on workbook contents, are scattered all over the place.

But in an organised kind of mess.

 

[baitmaster]

Use personal.xls for all sorts of stuff, its built up over about 10 years now

Auditing tools, sheet protection / formatting, incrementing ranges of numbers, deleting ranges that meet specific criteria, applying conditional formatting, applying version control and saving, appending text to equations / ranges of data etc etc

Its easy to update an interface in Excel, by writing new tools into a drop down menu bar, rather than creating icons. This still works in XL07, but not as well as in 03 (its hidden away in the "add-ins" tab)

 

[Johnny C]

Couldn't live without my personal.xlsb file! All sorts of stuff in there. Some out of the ark, like a macro to go down a sheet and change the colour of every other row so it look like the old stripy pyjama paper (for those of you who can remember that!). Some I use many times every day; custom number formats peculiar to accountants that MS don't seem to have considered (gettinbrackets on negative numbers so the positive numbers line up the digits).

Some are to launch userforms with code, for example a link manipulation userform that's the entire width of the screen so you can actually see what a link is.

Some are just bits of amusing junk - the magnifying glass. One to open/close the CD (there are spreadsheets still being used in past copmpanies that open & close the CD based on key presses (worksheet_change events) with a random number generator so it's once per 1,000 cell changes on average)

Functions I put in an add-in personal.xla. Maybe I should merge the two files now into a single add-in, make life easier. Especially now your PC gets locked down so tightly in companies.

 

[TheAverageBear]

I never used to, but at this job we cannot download outside software without it going through an entire testing and approval process. So I've coded my own version of several of the functions that are supplied by ASAP Utilities that live in my Personal.xlsm file. They are mostly simple things that work on the selected range and: convert to upper or lower case, trim leading & trailing spaces, delete all objects on a page, convert hyperlinks to text... and things like that.

 

[gardnertoo]

I'm right there with you Dom:

I get all lost when I'm at someone else's PC frantically pressing Ctrl+Shift+? and nothing happens!!!

The one keyboard shortcut I use all the time, the first thing for which I decided to build a personal.xls, is dead-simple:

Sub Rubberstamp()
'
' Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+V
'
Selection.Copy
Selection.PasteSpecial Paste:=xlPasteValues, Operation:=xlNone, SkipBlanks _
    :=False, Transpose:=False
Application.CutCopyMode = False
End Sub

I've also done a couple to take .csv outputs from specific websites and reformat them into proper workbooks with charts.