Creating Error-Proof Excel Spreadsheets

Author: David H. Ringstrom

David Ringstrom, CPA, shares a variety of tricks and techniques you can use to improve the integrity of your Excel spreadsheets as well as audit the spreadsheets created by others. In this empowering course, he presents simple ways to prevent errors from being introduced into your Excel workbooks.

David demonstrates every technique at least twice: first, on a PowerPoint slide with numbered steps, and second, in the subscription-based Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) version of Excel. David draws your attention to any differences in the older versions of Excel (2021, 2019, 2016 and earlier) during the course as well as in his detailed handouts. David also provides an Excel workbook that includes most of the examples he uses during the course.

Microsoft 365 is a subscription-based product that provides new feature updates as often as monthly. Conversely, the perpetual licensed versions of Excel have feature sets that don't change. Perpetual licensed versions have year numbers, such as Excel 2021, Excel 2019, and so on.

Publication Date: July 2023

Designed For
Practitioners who may benefit from improving the integrity of their Excel spreadsheets and boost their efficiency while doing so.

Topics Covered

• Building resilience into spreadsheets by avoiding daisy-chained formulas
• Displaying alternate results with XLOOKUP by populating the If_Not_Found argument instead of using IFERROR or IFNA
• Enabling a workbook-specific setting that will create an automatic back-up of critical workbooks
• Improving the integrity of many Excel features by placing column headings within a single row instead of spanning two or more rows
• Improving the integrity of spreadsheets by using SUMIF to look up values in a more flexible fashion than VLOOKUP
• Learning a simple design technique that greatly improves the integrity of Excel's SUM function
• Learning about the IFNA function available in Excel 2013 and later
• Limiting access to sensitive workbooks by way of password protection
• Preserving key formulas using hide and protect features
• Preventing errors from the start by choosing from thousands of free Excel spreadsheet templates
• Protecting workbooks to prevent users from renaming, hiding, unhiding, or otherwise affecting worksheets
• Removing Conditional Formatting when it's no longer needed within a spreadsheet

Learning Objectives

• Recognize and apply Data Validation to document input cells and enforce data integrity
• Describe how to hide and unhide multiple worksheets with a single command
• Recognize and apply Conditional Formatting to identify unlocked cells into which data can be entered
• Identify on which ribbon tab in Excel the Wrap Text feature appears
• Identify which mouse action enables you to skip clicking the Show button within the Custom Views dialog box
• Identify what SUMIF returns if it doesn't find a match

Level
Intermediate

Instructional Method
Self-Study

NASBA Field of Study
Computer Software & Applications (2 hours)

Program Prerequisites
Experience Working with Excel Spreadsheets.

Advance Preparation
None