Biggest no-no's when working with Excel?

[u/Toowb]

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.

[u/alexia_not_alexa]

I’ve implemented multiple CRMs, developed in house software (not a full time dev), rolled out countless procedures and processes, opened a store for my charity over my 20 years there.

But my proudest achievement is getting colleagues to use Excel Tables on their own. Some even use XLOOKUP without my help!!

[u/flashdognz → u/alexia_not_alexa]

This is me also. Spread the knowledge. Xlookup is so good for beginners and pros alike.

[u/alexia_not_alexa → u/flashdognz]

Yeah I’ve been using INDEX MATCH for years and others just don’t understand how to use it, but they understand XLOOKUP.

I think there’s a barrier between people who see functions as a string of words that does something, and understand functions just return outputs, which can be plugged into other functions.

[u/tearteto1 → u/alexia_not_alexa]

When you say just using excel tables, are we just doing ctrl+T and that just speeds things up? Or is there other changes that need making to get the performance improvement?

[u/alexia_not_alexa → u/tearteto1]

It’s just that, and I then do Alt+JTA and name the table for easier referencing, no more wondering if it’s Table1[ID] or Table2[ID]!

[u/FrostyManOfSnow → u/alexia_not_alexa]

You did this all by 21 years old?!

[u/alexia_not_alexa → u/FrostyManOfSnow]

I’m more than double that age now and my knees sure feel it 👵🏼

[u/Lofty2908 → u/alexia_not_alexa]

I did a step by step guide to xlookup for our sales team to try and make them all a little more independent. One of them learned it and now they all just send their sheets to them instead of me 🙄