The Homing Device Project (Part I - The GPS Module)

I'm a comic book fan. Mostly in comic books, one gets to see technologies that are out of this world, like Iron Man's suit, the Fantastic Four's Ultimate Nullifier or Batman's Whirly-Bat. But one thing I don't get is why can't someone invent a "homing device" in real life up until now? Batman uses it all the time. Spider-man too in the form of a "Spider-tracer".

String Manipulation in Excel VBA

There are times when I'm building an electronics project with 1000+ components. I encoded my bill of materials (BOM) on excel. Say, 10K resistor for R1 to R5 so I put in there "Resistor 10K" then on "location" I will put "R1-5" or "R1-R5". This is good as it facilitates easy inputting of location without having to type "R1 R2 R3 R4 R5". So the BOM is completed in this way. Perfect! All in place. Later on, I want to know the value of say "R4" on my BOM containing 500+ different resistors. I search "R4"... only to know that excel cannot find the string "R4" because I did put R1-R5. This means there's really no "R4" at all.

The question now is how do I facilitate easy inputting of location without worrying that excel "find" cannot locate it? Probably excel vba can help solve this common pitfall. Well perfect! vba contains rich string manipulation that can solve this one.