Spreadsheet Best Practices

Many of us have worked with Excel spreadsheets for years and consider ourselves to be pretty good at them.  Then I ran across the website Best Practices Modeling website.  I learned a lot and I’ve been converting some of my more complicated models into the Best Practices system.

My main takeaways are:

1. Use separate, differently formatted sheets for assumptions and output
2. Build in checks that will tell you if the result is out of the expected range.
3. Add a table of contents and a description of how the model works