EXLBP: Best Practices for Microsoft Excel

Knowing Excel is not enough. In order to be productive when using Excel, there is much more than just knowing what Excel can do; learning all its features, functions and capabilities.Planning carefully, thinking ahead and setting up worksheets and workbooks in a standard and conventional way will lead to robust and scalable spreadsheets.This workshop will help you create well-planned and executed spreadsheets. We will look at creating Excel spreadsheets in such a way that they will be easy to reuse in the future by you or your team members.

During this course you will learn how to:

• Create spreadsheets that are robust, consistent, scalable, easy to manage and transferable
• Learn how to interpret, navigate and increase integrity and linking in your spreadsheets

The student needs to bring at least one Excel workbook of their own. This should be a workbook that the student uses frequently. There will be a practical hands-on activity in the afternoon of the course to apply the knowledge learned.

Introduction
• Knowing Excel is not enough
• The Excel process

Why have and what are Best Practices, Standards and Conventions?
• Why?
• Productivity: Effective, Efficient, Effortless (The 3Fs)
• Future proofed
• Definitions

Best practices when working with data
• What is bad data?
• What is good data?
• A good data checklist
• Using Excel’s Table Functionality

Best practices for Worksheets
• Where to start in a worksheet?
• Worksheet layout
• Using names
• Using conventions when creating names
• Working with cell styles
• Conventions for cell styles
• Don’t mess with alignments
• Documentation
 
Best practices for Workbooks
• The best order for worksheets
• Worksheets that no workbook should be without

In Conclusion
• Putting it all together
• Practical Hands-on Exercise with own workbook