J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

When A Tip Is Not A Tip

There's a Microsoft Office blog at TechRepublic. Last week they posted an Excel tip: Save effort by defining names for Excel 2007 formulas.

In this tip, the author gives an example of creating a named formula to calculate the average of a range of cells. The only problem is that it's a terrible example. It doesn't save any effort at all, and is actually a very bad practice.

Follow her example, and then insert a new row above Row 4. That "effort-saving" tip now makes the formulas return incorrect results.

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Here's another tip from the same blog: Turn off gridlines in your Excel applications.

Your users may find it easier to work with your worksheet applications if they can't see the gridlines. For example, let's say you developed a worksheet that displays a new chart that compares monthly sales figures for the department each time a salesperson enters his/her monthly sales figures. Your worksheet includes instructions for using the spreadsheet, a bordered cell where they are to enter their data, and the changing chart.

To prevent the salespeople from working with the other cells in the worksheet, you can turn off the gridlines.

Huh? How does that work?