Overview
If you’ve worked with Excel long enough, chances are you’ve made some errors. Although it’s a fabulous application – many say the most important ever built – its power and wide array of features make it highly likely that you’ll make plenty of errors, even when you’re really careful. The good news is, most errors are preventable when you have good controls in place, especially a thorough review process.
In this article, we’ll look at 10 of the biggest Excel oopsies publicly recorded, and what you can do to avoid them. We’ll also reference some helpful tools that go beyond the standard Excel functionality to prevent and detect errors from happening or making things worse.
The 10 Oopsies
Tools that help
- Formula Picker – This lets you reuse your favorite formulas, along with several other formula tools. One of the best ways to limit errors is reusing your effort and not reinventing the wheel!
- Toggle Hidden Cells – This creates a list of all hidden rows and columns in your entire workbook. It also lets you toggle them all from visible to hidden (and vice versa) for one sheet or all sheets in the file, or hide several of them in one bulk step.
- Toggle Hidden Sheets – This creates a list of all hidden sheets in your entire workbook. It also lets you toggle them all from visible to hidden and vice versa, or hide several of them in one bulk step.
- Conditional Formatting Picker – This provides several helpful conditional formatting shortcuts, highlighting all cells containing formula errors, applying variances, and identifying hard-coded values.
Summary
You probably want to stay off the biggest Excel oopsies list. I hope you found these stories interesting and they gave you ideas of what to watch out for as you work in Excel. You should also have plenty of insights on how to prevent and detect errors with quality control steps.
What’s the biggest Excel oppsie you’ve ever seen directly in your career? Let us know in the comments below!
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