Taming the Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet Beast
There are precisely 65,536 rows and 256 columns available in Microsoft Excel. That’s nearly 17 million fields with which to shove chock full of calculations, values, text, and plenty of other information. An empty Excel spreadsheet is truly a massive canvas ready to feast upon all of your data.
Microsoft Excel is all about numerical calculations and information. It is the most widely used of all Microsoft Office programs. Some people use it for creating pivot tables and charts, and some for basic calculations. Brave individuals even use it as a database (generally a bad idea). Excel is flexible, easy, and useful, unless you end up neglecting your spreadsheets.
If you keep piling data into your spreadsheets with little regard to organization, you’ll soon end up with an out-of-control monster. When this happens, Excel can be an absolute nightmare; slow to load and respond, prone to corruption, and extremely inefficient.
Overgrown spreadsheets exist in many offices. These beasts eat processor power and memory like starving digital hogs at an all-you-can-byte buffet. Eventually, they consume so much of your computer’s resources that it becomes counter-productive to try to open them. That’s where data loss occurs and frustration boils over.
However, with just a few simple guidelines, you can consistently create Excel files that open fast, don’t work against you, and last a long time.
Keep these three simple rules in mind when you begin building a new Excel spreadsheet. These techniques will have your spreadsheets loading faster, staying organized, and they’ll be easy on your nerves.
#1: One Topic, One Worksheet! Don’t cram everything you need to do onto one worksheet. Remember, each Excel workbook can have numerous tabs. Separate your data by topic into intuitively-labeled tabs, and your Excel workbook will stay much more organized.
#2: Find the Right Type! Don’t store numbers as text, and don’t add unnecessary symbols and strange formatting. When you first set up your worksheet and begin entering data, select it, then click Format, and then Cells. Be sure you have the right category selected for the data you are entering. Keep your data clean and calculations will be a breeze.
#3: One Contiguous Block! This is probably the most important step in creating spreadsheets. When you’re creating a table of information, make sure you have small, meaningful field headings and you’re not skipping rows or columns. For example, if you’re using five fields of data, your headings should be in A1 through E1. Your first piece of information starts in A2, and the last bit of information ends somewhere down there in column E. This lets you quickly sort, filter, export, create charts, and generally work with your data easily. One big square full of data is easier to work with than data scattered everywhere.
It doesn’t take a lot to keep a neat spreadsheet, just a little bit of planning before you begin. Keep your spreadsheets trim and clean, and you won’t have overgrown spreadsheets with insatiable appetites!
©2010 Blue Moose Technology, LLC
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