What are they and how to work with collections in an Excel spreadsheet

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What are they and how to work with collections in an Excel spreadsheet

As someone completes their software-based training, they discover the number of features through it. A very particular case is learning to work with collections in an Excel spreadsheet.

A particular feature of the Office suite, or speaking specifically of this extension of it, is the ability to work through code to perform tasks. These codes are known as macros and are created with VBA.

This is known as Visual Basic, and it is nothing more than a group of commands that are preset by the program to execute what the user wants to add.

What is a collection?

Collections are creations used in many applications to be able to group a group of certain objects that are related to each other.

In turn, working with collections in an Excel spreadsheet is one of the most dynamic ways that allow you to work flexibly with the groups created.

Arrays, on the other hand, are much like collections within this system, whereby the collection is characterized by the group of objects it works with, which can dynamically grow or shrink based on the application.

This parameter is considered a class, so you must be declaring its instances in order to add or remove the elements it contains.

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Because these objects contain information processed in the form of data, there are also class modifications that establish security parameters.

Types of collections that can be enabled in Excel

Within each collection specification, there are types that vary depending on the purpose for which it is created. These in turn are provided by the .NET Framework.

System.Collections.Generic

It is exactly as its Spanish translation indicates, since it allows the creation of generic space class collections.

This type is most useful when the objects it contains within itself need to comply with a specific data type that has been established. Each type of collection has a series of classes, characterized by being used within themselves:

  • The Dictionary encoding represents a grouping of key pairs arranged according to their value.
  • Collections in an Excel spreadsheet have a list in the form of an index that allows access to the objects. It is established by the term List and allows ordering, searching and modifying.
  • Queue returns an ordered collection of those objects that made the first inputs and first outputs (FIFO).

  • In contrast, Stack represents the collection in order of last in, then first out (LIFO).

System.Collections.Concurrent

Efficiently and safely allocates the necessary space for threads to gain access to the elements it contains.

This type of class should be used when those threads have concurrent access to the collection that was created.

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Some of the classes used in this security parameter are BlockingCollection, CocurrentDictionary, among others.

System.Collections

It is responsible for storing the elements that occupy it as objects without a specific type, but defaults of type object.

Because it encompasses classes without any security parameters, its constant use is not recommended due to the probability of data leakage. Among the classes used for this type of collection are:

  • ArrayList is the representation of a collection that dynamically increases its size when it deems necessary.

  • On the other hand, Hashtable establishes a collection of pairs based on their key and value organized according to the hash code they have.

Visual Basic Collection

Finally, we find the Visual Basic collection to access elements with numerical index. It is used to add elements to an object without the need to specify or not the key to which it belongs.

Excel is a program that for many is difficult to use but with the necessary practice you can get to handle it easily. To work quickly, Excel offers you the option of displaying two sheets at the same time.

Once you finish your work in Excel, you may be interested in knowing that you can protect your spreadsheets.

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