10 things you should never do in Excel

Mastering Excel takes some experience and patience, but it's easy to make mistakes even if you've been using it for a long time. Sometimes, choices seem like a brilliant idea—until they're not, and the resulting problems are hard to troubleshoot.

In this article, I share 10 ways to avoid actions that seem good... at the time:

• Rely on multiple links.
• Destroy data.
• Rely on default settings.
• Ignore Table objects.
• Use Excel as a database or Word processor.
• Forget to protect your work.
• Leave blanks.
• Use numbers as column headings.
• Allow error values.
• Sluff off backups.