New Tabs in Spreadsheets
Continuing our series on the "Top 10 Dysfunctions of #Spreadsheets" -- consider #2 on our top 10 list: #DuplicatingTabs. Understand the impact and learn what you can do about it below. 👇
When you duplicate a tab in a spreadsheet, be it #GoogleSheets, #Excel, #Sharepoint or #MacNumbers, often you are “forking” your data model. And once you fork, you’ll find it hard to un-fork! 🍴
Take the example of a small departmental checklist, and we make the choice to split tabs out by each teammate charged with administering the checklist. Each teammate gets their own tab, which works great on the data entry side, but creates a bit of a challenge in tabulation. ⚠️
You may try to copy / paste the results into a “Totals” tab, but if your columns have started to drift, and your data sets have gotten massive, then you’ll be working the late shift to manually fix it all up. Or worse yet, you may inadvertently introduce inaccuracies by misaligning columns. So easy to do! 📈
You then may go reaching for your formulas manual to try your hand at SumIfs, but that’ll be hard to claw back with a non-normalized data model.
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What to do about it?!
Rather than #duplicate a tab, add a new #column! Adding a column will help keep your data model clean and keeps it on one tab for compilation.
In a #system, you have the opportunity to create individual tables and that will make all the difference for handling totals and unexpected changes. For example, perhaps you create an entirely new department, but that only some of your team should review … a system can handle that without breaking anything!
In this video, we briefly demo what this would feel like created in a #RapidAppDev environment such as #Claris #FileMaker.
In my days in a high school rock band, we used to say “three chords and the truth!” That’s all you need!
In this example, we also keep it radically simple -- we got three tables and the truth! And that gets you a pretty nice assessment module.
Rock on! 🎸
