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Don't fall foul of these common Microsoft Excel horrors
Avoid reputational Armageddon by steering clear of these simple spreadsheet errors, writes Simon Hurst.
When creating any table of data in Excel, it’s advisable to avoid including any blank rows or columns. Including blank rows or columns makes it more difficult for Excel to recognise your data as a single entity. Were we to select one of the scores in our example and choose to insert a chart, the list of students would not be included in that chart. However, as we have seen, this is not the only consequence. Because each column in our table is treated as a separate area, the Sort applies to the student column in isolation from the score column. Had we avoided the blank column B and simply made column A wider to accommodate the student names, we could have right-clicked on exactly the same cell and chosen Sort, Sort A to Z in exactly the same way, and our sort would have worked as intended (Figure 3).
This error is so common that Excel includes a specific check to highlight it. We can create a formula using the SUM() function to add up all our student scores (Figure 4).