Dear Friends,
Excel is important
I have been hearing about Microsoft for over a decade. My first memories were in the computer class of my seventh-grade technology class. (12 years old for non-Americans) Taught by a grey-haired mustached Mr. Crowley who looked like Grover Cleveland. Since then I have taken courses on using Excel, and courses that use exclusively Excel. I find myself in one of these courses once again.
Excel is a collection of cells. Combined together across 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns 1 to create a single spreadsheet. A single excel program has a total of 255 sheets.
The spreadsheet first came out in 1979 on an Apple computer. Since that inception 42 years ago. 2The spreadsheet has become ubiquitous in many a setting. Business, to personal finance, scheduler, to not. An excel spreadsheet can be the worst or the savior of an existence.
During the early to mid-90’s a company called Microsoft was dominating the world of computers and computer programming. A good recap of it can be found here on The Street. But, anti-trust never broke the company up, and even today anti-trust of FAANG have many of their roots in the anti-trust of Bill Gates and Microsoft.
While other spreadsheet applications have been introduced and are “free.” Microsoft’s Excel program continues to be a gold standard. (Although Google Sheets is not awful)
Within this gold standard of boxes, a blank canvas appears. Asking the question of what to be done, and where to start.
There are guides, tutorials, and plenty of research on what to do. But, for myself and for you, I wanted to jot down some ideas of what, and how I would approach Excel.
Design a good spreadsheet
Before getting into the cells, formulas, macro’s, VBA’s, and so on. Let’s start with a good design. Something that looks pretty. Looks matter, and anyone that says otherwise has never gotten third place in a beauty pageant they didn’t enter. (I haven’t either, but I know looks matter.)
The header is the top few rows and columns of a spreadsheet. These get the most attention out of any section of an Excel file. Loading and starting a new excel file everyone sees the same rows and columns on the first sheet. So, it’s most important to make these look good. It’s similar to a person. Where we only seem to look at the head of someone. body, footer, it's replicable of the human body. Everyone looks at the head, a few at the body, and finally the feet if we are not trying to be rude. Using this most of the work should go into the eyes and the smile of a spreadsheet.
So, how can we give the beauty treatment to this top portion of the head? So, that everyone will think we are Angelina Jolie.
The first thing we can do is expand the size of the Excel cells. The spreadsheet application is finicky and favors the tactile. The more precise the mouse movements you make the more I can predict how fast you will succeed. Success does not start with moving a row or column but it’s a way to show anyone how much talent is in those little fingers of yours. Clicking and dragging these rows or columns expands it. Big enough so that we might write some useful information into them.
Once moved we can begin typing big letters. Letters so big, even someone from across the room, without their glasses, in need of a glass of water could find and pay attention to. So, what to put in this most valuable of territory?
Heading with information including:
Name of the entity
Name of spreadsheet
The last date modified.
Here is an example of one of the projects I worked on. This is the first page of the workbook. To view the full workbook check out my blog post about it. I used this page to outline, and give a table of contents for the viewer. Whether it is solely myself, or another person.
An introduction page allows for myself and anyone else to get an idea of how to use a workbook. A window dressing that gives the person on the outside a clear look at the inside of the mind of the worker.
Following the introduction, at the bottom of the page is a variety of spreadsheets listed. Each of which is clickable and brings up another list of rows and columns. I have separated different spreadsheets based on the information that is inside of them.
A good spreadsheet has only the information needed inside of it. In the introduction, I don’t need all ten-thousand rows of data I have in raw data. I have the most important sheets first and preceding onward I have the less important sheets.
A click to any of these sheets will bring up different pages. On these pages, I begin to do calculations and this is where Excel starts to shine. Going to any cell will allow it to be written on with keys from the keyboard. Clicking back to the cell allows for its editing.
It’s a best practice to set up as many columns of formulas as possible. A cluster of formulas can be hard to understand. A clear formula is one where everyone can read it, they can see through the writing what the writer was thinking.
With a formula now into excel, we can tie our proverbial shoes and add footer information. Saving an Excel file will either be on the computer you are operating or on the cloud. I have mine saved on my personal computer. This can be seen in the bottom left of the picture.
Let’s talk about that long string of words:
C:\Users\Greg\Documents\Thinkful\Program-files\Capstone-1-Lariat.xlsx
Each one of the backslashes means another layer deeper into the world of my computer. The C at the start is my computer. A fun fact is windows is written in the C programming language. The next word is Users which has the only one in the universe but you don’t know that and the computer doesn’t either. All it knows is that a User exists and its name is Greg.
Continuing this line of thought you can see the different folders I have my excel file stored into. Finally a . appears in the long string. This period says what type of file it is and it is not something I will try to pronounce I can just read it and think it is an excel file.
With the document saved, I hope you have learned something, and if you have considered sharing it with a friend.
Exploring the unknown,
Greg
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/excel-specifications-and-limits-1672b34d-7043-467e-8e27-269d656771c3
https://www.cultofmac.com/460680/apple-ii-killer-app-visicalc/