Excel best practices
- Don’t Merge cells
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- merging cells will make your life difficult when building formulas, try to avoid it
- Follow the three rules for tidy data
- Each variable is a column
- Each observation is a row
- Each type of observational unit is a table
- Use two monitors and split the view
- it will make your life in Excel soo much better, fewer errors when building formulas, and frustration level decrease massively
- If the dataset is not huge use tables
- formulas within the table will be applied automatically to all the rows
- formulas will be easier to read as they will have the column title in their description
- formulas or pivot tables connected to the table will be dynamic, no need to update the range if you add or remove rows from the table
- If the dataset is big set calculation to manual
- it will prevent Excel to crash or run slow
- Don’t hide rows or columns
- if you hide items there’s a high probability that you’ll forget about them and, as a result you may end up making errors
- If you want to tidy up the worksheet, grouping is a better choice because it will be visible that some items have been collapsed
- Save a lot