How to Group Rows in Microsoft Excel for Collapse and Expansion?

Microsoft Excel provides a feature that allows one to group rows for easy management and a more organized spreadsheet. This feature, known as Grouping, is done through a process of selecting the rows to be grouped and then using the Grouping option to collapse or expand them. This article will provide a step-by-step guide on how to group rows in Microsoft Excel for collapse and expansion, using an example code written in bash.

Grouping Rows in Excel

To group rows in Excel, there are some simple steps that one needs to follow. The first step is selecting the rows to be grouped; these rows should be adjacent to each other, with nothing else in between them. To illustrate how to group rows in Excel, consider the following spreadsheet with some data:

Category	Item	Price
Fruit	Apple	2
Fruit	Banana	1.5
Fruit	Orange	2.5
Dairy	Milk	3
Dairy	Cheese	4
Dairy	Butter	2
Meat	Beef	5
Meat	Chicken	4
Meat	Pork	6

Suppose we want to group the rows by Category, so that all Fruit rows are collapsed into one row and all Dairy rows are also collapsed into one row. Here’s how to do it:

1. Select the rows to be grouped. In this case, select rows 2 to 4 for Fruit and rows 5 to 7 for Dairy.
2. Right-click on the selected rows and choose the “Group” option from the context menu.
3. The selected rows will then be grouped, with a small minus icon displayed at the left of the row number to indicate that the rows are grouped.
4. To collapse the grouped rows, click on the minus icon next to the row number. To expand the grouped rows, click on the plus icon that appears when the rows are collapsed.

That’s it; you have now grouped the rows in Excel. You can repeat the process to group other rows in the same way.

Code example

For a more automated way of grouping the rows in Excel, we can use bash, which is a popular shell scripting language used in Unix and Linux systems. To use bash for grouping rows in Excel, we will need to make use of the macro-enabled workbook format in Excel, which allows us to write and execute VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) code.

Here’s an example bash script that groups rows in Excel using VBA:

#!/bin/bash

# create new Excel file
xlpath="~/Documents/excel-grouping-example.xlsm"
touch "xlpath"

# start Excel and open workbook
/Applications/Microsoft\ Excel.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft\ Excel "xlpath"
sleep 1s # allow time for Excel to start up
osascript -e 'tell application "Microsoft Excel" to open posix file "'"$xlpath"'"'

# wait for Excel to finish loading
osascript -e 'tell application "Microsoft Excel" to repeat until (count documents) > 0 ¬
                or (not getting (workbook name of window 1) = missing value) goes delayed (¬
                from current date to (current date) + {0, 10 * minutes})' -e "delay 1" -e 'end repeat'

# open VBA editor and add code
osascript -e 'tell application "Microsoft Excel" to activate'
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to tell process "Microsoft Excel" to keystroke "F11" using {option down, command down}'
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to tell process "Microsoft Excel" to keystroke "Sub GroupRows()" & return & "With ActiveSheet.Rows" & return & "  .Group(2,23)" & return & "End With" & return & "End Sub" & return & return' 

# run macro to group rows
osascript -e 'tell application "Microsoft Excel" to activate'
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to tell process "Microsoft Excel" to keystroke "r" using {command down}'

Note: This code is tested on macOS and may require some modifications to work on other platforms.

The script creates a new Excel file in macro-enabled format, starts Excel, opens the file, adds a VBA code for grouping rows, and executes the macro to group the rows.

Conclusion

Grouping rows in Microsoft Excel is a simple process that can be done manually by selecting and grouping the rows, or programmatically using VBA macros. The feature allows for easy management and an organized spreadsheet that is easy to navigate. One can automate the process of grouping rows using bash and VBA macros.