Cell References and Names

Introduction

Probably the most impactful thing we can do to speed development and maintenance, and at the same time reduce errors in  Excel is to make our projects as understandable as possible. 

Make projects as understandable as possible

Even when reworking simple projects, one of the biggest investments in time is trying to understand what was done before and what was intended. And when working on new, complex projects, we can easily forget what we did at the beginning of the project, or remember it poorly. That will cost us time to get back up to speed, and may cause errors. 

There are several things we can do to make our projects understandable: follow standards, maintain structure, declutter, reduce complexity are a few. But the most important is documentation.

The most important is documentation

There are several ways to document a project. We can create end users and technical manuals. We can use labels. We can add comments or use data validation as comments. And we can eliminate one of the most confusing aspects for Excel: cryptic cell references.

We can eliminate one of the most confusing aspects for Excel: cryptic cell references.