Search code examples
excelvbarangeuppercase

Convert an entire range to uppercase without looping through all the cells


right now I'm using the following code to convert a list of ticker symbols from lowercase to upper case letters:

Dim Tickers As String
Dim n As Integer
For n = 2 To Last
    Tickers = UCase(W.Cells(n, 1).Value)
    W.Cells(n, 1).Value = Tickers
Next n

Is there a method I can use to convert the whole range in one line? something like:

Range("A1:A20").convertouppercasesomehow

Solution

  • Is there a method I can use to convert the whole range in one line?

    Yes you can convert without looping. Try this

    Sub Sample()
        [A1:A20] = [INDEX(UPPER(A1:A20),)]
    End Sub
    

    Alternatively, using a variable range, try this:

    Sub Sample()
        Dim rng As Range
        Set rng = Range("A1:A20")
        rng = Evaluate("index(upper(" & rng.Address & "),)")
    End Sub
    

    As per your example

    W.Range("A1:A20") = [index(upper(A1:A20),)]
    

    Explanation

    There are two parts to [A1:A20] = [INDEX(UPPER(A1:A20),)]

    PART 1

    As shown above, [A1:A20] is nothing but just a short way of writing Range("A1:A20")

    PART 2

    [INDEX(UPPER(A1:A20),)]

    Index and Upper are worksheet functions. So you can use Application.Worksheetfunction.Index() but since we don't have an equivalent of UPPER like Application.Worksheetfunction.UPPER(), we can only write it as [cell] = [UPPER(cell)]

    Now with that line we are instructing VBA to return an array and this is where INDEX comes into play. (As we are aware, there are two forms of the INDEX function: the array form and the reference form.) By not specifying a row or a column of the array, we are simply letting Excel know that we want the whole array. (Mentioned in VBA help as well) So basically what we are doing is converting each cell in [A1:A20] into uppercase