Excel is quite ubiquitous but not many people use it well. The finance industry use it a lot and there are some good practices created. The key to use Excel (or other spreadsheet) well is to remember that there are two layers in it, the formula and the result, and it encourage people to edit it as they read it.

The first rule is never start from A1 cell. Keep two rows and two columns empty so you can easily add something, be it a temporary calculation to try out something, or allow some empty space so you can right click on and do something else. Besides, a spreadsheet allows you to set the size, you can simply make the rows and columns very narrow to conserve screen real estates.

The next rule is to make the worksheet easier to read. Unifying the font and row height, all numbers in the same format (e.g., 2 d.p. with thousand separator), text cells all aligned to left while numbers aligned to right, are some of the trivial ones. But I think the most eye-opening is the color conventions, which you can easily spot whether a cell is a constant or a formula:

Type Example Color
Hard-coded input =12.34 Blue
Formula =D3*2 Black
Link to other worksheet =Sheet2!C3 Green
Link to other files =[Book2]Sheet1!C3 Red
Link to external data providers =BDP("GOOG US Equity", "PX_LAST") Dark red

We color the text and leave the background and border color for other use (e.g., different sections, or mark alternative rows in a table, or even use it for heatmap so we can visually easier to identify some interesting spot). Also, to make the sheet less messy, try not to use borders at all but use horizontal rules at strategic location, refer to LaTeX booktabs package for what a publish-quality table should look like.

Also try not to hide rows and columns, but group them and collapse them. It would be easier to toggle the visibility.

These should make the most impact already. Of course, there are some other tips learned from software engineering:

• keep number constants off the formula, use a cell to hold it so you are easier to modify and eaiser to understand what those numbers are
• comments, to explain the numbers and explain the formula, and put down references for such decision
• avoid link to other files, since this will be easily broken
• keep the model and view separate, i.e., put the detailed calculation in one sheet and executive summary at another
• elevator jump: Keep one column or row empty and put a placeholder (e.g., “x”) at strategic location. Then we can use this row or column to quickly move around, using Ctrl-Arrow key

For the hot keys, these should be productive:

• Mouse click on cells while holding Ctrl to select multiple cells; then type something with Ctrl-Enter to populate to all cells
• Shift-Space to select entire row; Ctrl-Space to select entire column
• Ctrl-Plus to add row/column/cell and Ctrl-Minus to delete row/column/cell (mac use Cmd instead of Ctrl); it will automatically add/delete row or column if the entire row/column is already selected
• F4 is to repeat last action (e.g., set color/font/format, etc.)
• Holding Ctrl or Shift while selecting multiple sheet will create a group of worksheets, then entering on one cell will apply to the same cell on all sheets
• Find cells with formula: F5 will pop-up to “Go To” dialog, click on “Special” button at bottom corner and select “Formula” will select all cells with formula
• similarly, can select all cells that are blank, entered a constant, with an object, etc.
• Ctrl-; to enter today’s date
• Ctrl-Arrow to move to the end on that direction
• Ctrl-Shift-L to toggle filtering of the selected cells
=INDEX(A1:Z10, 3, 5) gives E3. We can think of =INDEX(array, i, j) as array[i][j] with row-major array and indices start at 1.
=MATCH(needle, haystack, 0) is to find exact match of “needle” in vector “haystack”. The vector must either be a row array or a column array. The third parameter can be -1 or 1 for “less than or equal to” or “greater than or equal to” look up, but this would imply the vector to be sorted in ascending order or descending order respectively. If doing exact match, the search term “needle” can be a wildcard, e.g. abc*.
Combine together, we may write a formula such as =INDEX(F3:P11, MATCH("foo",A3:A11,0), 2)