Question

I have an Excel spreadsheet which is being used to specify filesystem build information for our Unix team.

This worksheet would have different information depending on the system to be built. For example, a production system would have many filesystems, whereas a development system only one or two.

So based on user input, we would populate one or other of the two input worksheet formats (‘dev’,’prod’) but the destination worksheet will be always be the same. Only one of the dev or prod worksheets would be visible and active for users to input data at any given time.

How do we tell Excel to use a particular input worksheet to calculate another output worksheet?

My initial idea was that, for simplicity’s sake, the ‘output’ worksheet would take its data from an ‘input’ worksheet, and that we would dynamically make either the ‘dev’ or ‘prod’ template become the ‘input’ worksheet. Is this the right way to do this, or is there some better method?

Answer 1

There’s a few ways depending on the complexity of the sheet:

• If you only have a few worksheets, and users would just select ‘Production’ or ‘Test’, you could set up the conditional logic in the formulas. For example: =if(A1=’Test’,TestSheet!A1 + TestSheet!A2, ProdSheet!A1 + ProdSheet!A2)
• You could utilize the same type of idea as above, but add more complexity using vlookup tables
• Your VBA code could create the entire Excel spreadsheet dynamically based on the user input