How to keep history of data changes in one excel workbook or sheet to another workbook or sheet

good afternoon,

I am working on an excel sheet where I have a table of data. This data represents several metrics that my department wants to keep track on. Whenever someone wants to populate the table with new data, the previous data in the cells are lost.

How can someone create a separate sheet where you can store all the values of that table automatically? I mean, when a change is done in one of the table cell, the new value to be automatically stored in another table that will keep all the values(old and new) of the cells? I tried the "track changes" but I'm not sure whether I like this way so much.

Does anyone know a more efficient way to do this? Through a macro for example?

Thank you!

Answer

(I'm on mobile so I can't provide a very fleshed out answer right now.)

I have written code to exactly this. My intent was to track all changes on a critical sheet edited by multiple users. If there was a dispute about where data came from, I could review the log. Here are VBA pieces that will come in handy.

Worksheet_Change event will fire every time the worksheet is changed.

If Not Intersect(Target, Range("A1:G12")) Is Nothing will tell you whether or not the cell(s) that changed are within some range you care about.

It's faster to store the values you want to log into an array and them set some range on your log sheet to be equal to that array as opposed to setting each cell on the log sheet individually.

Take a stab and see how far you get. I can be a little more verbose tomorrow.

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Next Day Edit

Here's some code that will watch the range A1:G12 on whatever sheet has the code in it. If r is the row that was changed, then the code will copy everything from Ar:Gr into a sheet whose code name is shtLog. (Code name is the name shown in VBA, not the name on the tab you see in Excel.) This should get you moving in the right direction.

Private Sub Worksheet_Change(ByVal Target As Range)
    Dim r As Integer
    Dim c As Integer
    Dim arr(1 To 1, 1 To 12)
    If Not Intersect(Target, Range("A1:G12")) Is Nothing Then
        r = Target.Row
        For c = 1 To 12
            arr(1, c) = Cells(r, c).Value
        Next
        With shtLog
            .Range(.Cells(.UsedRange.Rows.Count + 1, 1), .Cells(.UsedRange.Rows.Count + 1, 12)) = arr
        End With
    End If
End Sub