Transposing the Formulas in a Table of Cells

The code in this article might not work well with modern Dynamic Array formulas.

Someone asked me if it was possible to transpose a table of cells, but in such a way that the formula of each cell is kept intact. I decided VBA was the way to go and produced a small but very useful little routine for that.

Imagine the following table:

An area of cells I wish to transpose

Now I'd like to transform that table into this one (see highlighted range):

The result after pasting I want to achieve

If you try a copy > paste special > formulas > transpose, this is what you get:

The actual result of a paste special transpose

But it is not what we want, is it.

With the following piece of VBA, you can easily transpose your table, without garbling your formulas:

Option Explicit

Sub TransposeFormulas()
    Dim vFormulas As Variant
    Dim oSel As Range
    If TypeName(Selection) <> "Range" Then
        MsgBox "Please select a range of cells first.", _
                vbOKOnly + vbInformation, "Transpose formulas"
        Exit Sub
    End If
    Set oSel = Selection
    vFormulas = oSel.Formula2 'Note: for older Excel versions, use .Formula
    vFormulas = Application.WorksheetFunction.Transpose(vFormulas)
    oSel.Offset(oSel.Rows.Count + 2).Resize(oSel.Columns.Count, oSel.Rows.Count).Formula2 = vFormulas
End Sub

So how does this work?

First we check whether a range of cells has been selected, otherwise the code will produce a runtime error:

    If TypeName(Selection) <> "Range" Then
        MsgBox "Please select a range of cells first.", _
                vbOKOnly + vbInformation, "Transpose formulas"
        Exit Sub
    End If

Next, we store the selected cells in an object variable (which is not really necessary), so we can work with that set of cells:

Set oSel = Selection

Now the formulas of these cells are pulled into a variable of type Variant in one go:

vFormulas = oSel.Formula2

If you step through the code (using my example) the Locals window of the Visual Basic Editor (VBE) shows this for the variable vFormulas after executing the statement above:

The locals window showing variable contents

As you can see, vFormulas is a 4*3 array.

Next we want to swap rows and columns of the vFormulas variable, for which I use the Transpose worksheet function:

vFormulas = Application.WorksheetFunction.Transpose(vFormulas)

The structure of vFormulas changes to this:

The locals window showing variable contents

Presto! We now have a 4 * 3 array.

Finally, we need to push back the formulas to the worksheet. To be able to do that, we must specify a target range of the exact dimensions as the array variable. For that I use the Resize method. Note I also move down a couple of cells using Offset, so the copy of the table is placed 2 rows below the original:

oSel.Offset(oSel.Rows.Count + 2).Resize(oSel.Columns.Count, oSel.Rows.Count).Formula2 = vFormulas

Done!