Question

Is there a way to pretty print Excel formulas?

I’ve got a few worksheets of semi-complex formulas to slog through, so this would make my life a bit easier.

I’m just looking to turn something like this

AC6+AD6+(IF(H6="Yes",1,IF(J6="Yes",1,0)))+IF(X6="Yes",1,0)

into something more readable without manually doing it in Vim or the like. Excel does do color-matching on the parentheses, but it’s still all mashed together on one line.

Answer 1

This VBA code will win no awards, but it’s O.K. for quickly looking at typical formulas. It just does what you’d do with parens or separators manually. Stick it in a code module and call it from the VBA immediate window command line. (EDIT: I had to look at some formulas recently, and I improved on what was here from my original answer, so I came back and changed it.)

Public Function ppf(f) As String
    Dim formulaStr As String

    If IsObject(f) Then
        Debug.Assert TypeOf f Is Range

        Dim rng As Range
        Set rng = f

        formulaStr = rng.Formula
    Else
        Debug.Assert VarType(f) = vbString

        formulaStr = f
    End If

    Dim tabs(0 To 99) As Long

    Dim tabNum As Long
    tabNum = 1

    Dim tabOffset As Long

    Dim i As Long
    Dim c As String
    For i = 1 To Len(formulaStr)
        c = Mid$(formulaStr, i, 1)

        If InStr("({", c) > 0 Then
            ppf = ppf & c

            tabNum = tabNum + 1
            tabs(tabNum) = tabs(tabNum - 1) + tabOffset + 1
            tabOffset = 0

            ppf = ppf & vbCrLf & Space(tabs(tabNum))
        ElseIf InStr(")}", c) > 0 Then
            tabNum = tabNum - 1
            tabOffset = 0

            ppf = ppf & c & vbCrLf & Space(tabs(tabNum))
        ElseIf InStr("+-*/^,;", c) > 0 Then
            tabOffset = 0

            ppf = ppf & c & vbCrLf & Space(tabs(tabNum))
        Else
            ppf = ppf & c

            tabOffset = tabOffset + 1
        End If
    Next i
End Function

If you call it like so:

?ppf([q42])

you don’t have to worry about escaping your double quotes and so on. You’ll get output that looks like this:

AC6+
AD6+
(
 IF(
    H6="Yes",
    1,
    IF(
       J6="Yes",
       1,
       0)
    )
 )
+
IF(
   X6="Yes",
   1,
   0)

You can also call it with a plain string.