28 Dec 2020: for further thoughts on this subject see Set Variable By Name Revisited.
29 July 2017: custom function updated to simplify the clearing of existing vars.
16 April 2017: custom function has been updated to auto-interpret dates (rather than treating them as sequential division problems)… e.g., to recognize “4/16/2017” as a date, as opposed to “4 ÷16 ÷ 2017”.
Recently, in the midst of various reporting and charting projects, I’ve found myself wishing for an easy way to “dynamically instantiate” one or more variables… in other words, set them by name, with the name determined programmatically, as opposed to being hard coded.
This issue has come up from time to time on this blog over the last five years or so, most notably in Dynamic Variable Instantiation, where I observed that…
…and then proposed an unwieldy mass of gobbledygook as a workaround, e.g.,
Actually, the preceding isn’t too bad for occasional use, especially if the value you’re passing to the variable is as simple as the GetSummary string shown above. Continue reading “Set Variable by Name” →