Best Practice Excel ????

Sitting on the 7:21am from Peterborough to Doncaster today and amongst the train rattles I overheard a fascinating conversation in the seat behind me which had me chuckling.

The voice behind me was from the West Coast of America and was having a conversation with someone about a piece of work they were collaborating on.  The analysis sounded like an investment decision and of significant value from the “….can you show all numbers in millions….” comment.  Obviously the tool of choice that had been entrusted to these gentlemen’s employer to justify whether the investment was worthy or not was the most popular investment appraisal financial solution…………Excel!

I don’t normally eavesdrop conversations but the gentleman from the USA wasn’t exactly quiet (no comments about stereotypes please) and the topic was relevant for the blog and therefore the greater good.  Again, given the volume of my friend from California I can only assume the investment wasn’t confidential…….?

The comment that really had me chuckling was “……..and could you make your you put in some comments into those little yellow stickies, that was I can see your logic for each item…..”

Followed up with “…………can you shade cells in ‘red’ that have formula in, shade cells ‘blue’ with cells that link to other worksheets and obviously input cells are ‘yellow’…….but NOT the bold highlighter yellow, the lighter shade of ‘yellow’…….”

Now I am digging the yellow, I don’t think I’ve ever created a spreadsheet that didn’t use the light shade of yellow for input cells OBVIOUSLY.  In fact, most systems (in addition to Excel) also use the universal yellow for input cells too so that’s a given in my book.  Get’s me thinking, I’m going to copyright the shade of yellow……..from here on in, it shall be known as “Carfax Yellow”………nice!

Back to my friend on the phone, his last comment before he naturally lost signal was “…..that’s great, if you could make those best practice changes, then we’re good to go!”

Aside from the yellow, I’m disappointed in myself for not knowing the rest of his lecture.  I’ve been using spreadsheets for over 20 years but all this time I’ve been using them in a sub-standard manner.  I did wonder how this guy would have used a Classic Lotus (backslash) spreadsheet back in the day, especially before ‘wysiwig’ (shift colon) came along.  I had even been part of a ‘task force’ many years ago to convert all of our old Lotus spreadsheets to this new-fangled Excel back in the day…….don’t get me started on macros…….and all this time, the only best practice rule I had been following was the use of “Carfax Yellow”.

As I got up to exit at Doncaster, I did see the gentleman in question looked about 12 years old so no point in asking his view on the name “Carfax Yellow”………….