Design strategies for Excel worksheets

Create an Excel worksheet worksheet: The primary document that you use in Excel to store and work with data. Also known as spreadsheets. Worksheets are made up of cells that arrange rows or columns. The worksheet is always stored in the workbook. There is nothing mystical about it, after all, it's just some rows and columns. We certainly don't want to discourage your creativity. Even today, more than 10 years after we started writing spreadsheets, we can still see the wonderful new uses of the ol grid. But there are several principles that make life a little easier and some pitfalls you need to be careful about. This article presents some of the questions you should ask yourself before you can set up your own worksheets by installing digital devices.

What data should be in the row and which should be in the column?

Sometimes this seems pretty obvious, but generally, the most abundant data is always placed in rows rather than columns. You should consider the readability of the data when making a decision.

For example, a month-oriented worksheet, shown in the following illustration, works well with the month label, regardless of whether the month label is above or to the left of the worksheet. In the case shown in the figure, making the month label on the side makes it easier to view the worksheet on the screen, and makes the worksheet easier to match with the paper. You should make the worksheets longer, not wider, so that you can use the page UP and PAGE DOWN keys for screen navigation.

The worksheet shown in the figure has only four columns of detailed data, but if the worksheet has more detailed data than the number of months, it might be a better choice to put the month in the column. After horizontal orientation, the data displayed on the previous worksheet can still work, but to see all of the data you must scroll the scroll bar to the right, as shown in the following illustration.

The details that are accumulated on a worksheet are most appropriate for rows from top to bottom-or, in contrast, a deep, narrow worksheet. You can certainly build a light, wide (but a few lines deep, but many columns) spreadsheet, but perhaps soon you will regret it. You have to keep scrolling the scroll bar to the right to find information, and when you are printing, you have to deal with strange column breaks, and a shallow and wide table can cause headaches.

Policy Tips

Once the worksheet is filled with data, it can be time-consuming to change-especially since it may have different designs from the beginning.

Do you want to print your worksheet?

Before you start working on a worksheet, it's a good idea to ask yourself if your worksheet needs to be printed. You may find that you don't have to consider printing problems, such as when a worksheet is used for information storage or just as a reference.

If you want to print a worksheet, you need to consider how tables and data should be rendered. This will make a huge difference to the overall design of your worksheet. For example, a horizontally oriented worksheet shown in the previous illustration requires two pages of printing, even if you use landscape mode in the Page Setup dialog box (File menu, Page Setup command). The second print contains a partial month total, but the name of the area is not visible unless you repeat the title on each page using the Print Title option on the Sheet tab of the dialog box.

Policy Tips

For large worksheets, whether horizontally or vertically oriented, it is absolutely necessary to make the printed results easy to understand, repeat the header row at the top of each page, or repeat the title column on the left side of each page.