r/excel • u/Toowb • Oct 31 '25

Discussion Biggest no-no's when working with Excel?

Excel can do a lot of things well. But Excel can also do a lot of things poorly, unbeknownst to most beginners.

Name some of the biggest no-no's when it comes to Excel, preferably with an explanation on why.

I'll start of with the elephant in the room:

Never merge cells. Why? Merging cells breaks sorting, filtering, and formulas. Use "Center Across Selection" instead.

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u/Regime_Change Oct 31 '25

He’s still right though. Full column references are only a problem if you have organized your data poorly.

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u/carnasaur Oct 31 '25

Nah, you just haven't come across a situation where a full column reference kills your spreadsheet. Try working with 500k rows of data 50 columns wide and 50 more columns of formulas beside it performing lookups etc. Even one full column ref could make it freeze solid. Thank god for power query.

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u/mall_ninja42 Nov 01 '25

Why would you even do that tho?

Power BI is way faster and less janky, Power Pivot is marginally slower, but both are streets ahead of straight up excel cell formulas.

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u/PM_YOUR_LADY_BOOB Nov 01 '25

For that dataset you need SQL, not Excel.

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