No More Mess: A Practical Guide for Excel Workbook Organization

It seems a bit awkward to talk about Excel amidst the avalanche of articles for AI, advanced data platforms, and fancy dashboards. Yet, Excel is still at the foundation of many businesses and is here to stay, despite its death having been announced many times in its 40-year existence. There are millions of articles, videos, and posts across all platforms commenting on a feature, teaching a function, or presenting some clever trick with it. While fluency in Excel tools and features is a solid foundation for using it in the real world, this is not enough for a long and happy life with it. The business reality is dominated by the high volume and speed of projects, tasks, and data, as well as by ever-increasing complexity and demand for sharing and communication. This imposes greater demands on how we use Excel or any other tool. This context requires well-readable and easy-to-understand files. However, it does not seem to be the case. Workbooks are usually messy, difficult to read, understand, or modify. We are all so used to Excel files with just some data on the sheets headed by cryptic column names that we do not even see this as an issue. Indeed, it is not one in some cases, but it is a big one when it comes to teams and individuals that create, update, manage, and share significant volume of spreadsheets, as well as when the workbooks produce impactful outcomes and are communicated with many parties.