Tuesday, February 15, 2011

The Magic of Microsoft Excel Macros

All through my Ph.D. one powerful tool that helped me a lot in organizing the information is Microsoft Office Excel. It has so many functionalities that I always felt evoked working on new issues using excel. It is not only useful for data analysis and chart preparation, but also has applications in Bioinformatics as mentioned in my previous posts. In this post I want to share with you a macro that I created in excel which on a single click gives the following details about a sequence.
1. Length of the sequence
2. RNA Sequence
3. Number of residues of Adenine, Guanine, Thymine and Cytosine
4. GC percentage of the sequence and
5. Six reading frame of the sequence.
All you need to do is just enable macros in your excel sheet import this macro or create a new one with this code. Then enter the DNA sequence in the excel sheet in which the macro has been created and then go to the cell below that sequence and press Ctrl+Shift+W.

How to enable macros in Excel:
Office 2007: Go to All Options (the office symbol on the extreme top left), then got to Excel Options. In the Popular window that opens check the third check box Show Developer tab in the Ribbon and click OK. This will make the Developer tab to show up in the main ribbon. Now go to the Developer tab and click Macro security. The Macro security is set to Disable all macros without notification as default, change it to select Enable all macros. This will enable all macros to work normally.

How to import a macro or create a new macro:
Importing a macro: To import a macro go to Developer tab and then to Visual Basic, then go to File and then to Import file, choose the directory in which the macro is present (.bas file). Then close the Visual Basic window.
Creating a new macro: To create a new macro go to Visual Basic, then to Insert then to Module, copy paste all the code into the resulting window and save it, then close the Visual Basic.
Either of the above two steps is essential to make this work.

Now paste any DNA sequence in a cell of this excel workbook. Go to the cell below that and click Ctrl+Shift+W and get all the above mentioned details for the sequence.

Click here to go to text file that has the code for the macro.

So try out this and let me know if you have any suggestions, criticisms and ideas, bye :)

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

A superior score for ranking and mapping scientific journals - Eigenfactor

Ranking and mapping scientific journals From eigenfactor.org