Spreadsheet good practice guidelines
Purpose of these guidelines
The purpose of the guidelines is simple: Help you make better spreadsheets.
Spreadsheets are an essential tool, used for many applications in almost every organization. Sometimes spreadsheets are used for mission critical applications. Often, they're just useful. Either way, we need good spreadsheets. But most spreadsheets are not good.
In fact, many spreadsheets are outright bad – being poorly designed, haphazardly constructed, hard to use, lacking documentation, having complex and confusing formulae, and around 95% of spreadsheets contain errors. In addition, 60% of large companies describe their reliance on spreadsheets as Spreadsheet Hell.
These guidelines provide a detailed basis for making good spreadsheets, as a means of reducing errors and alleviating the pain caused by bad spreadsheets.
Our target audience is broad, covering everyone who works with spreadsheets.
We're especially focussed on the people who build spreadsheets used by others.
People who inherit a spreadsheet, built by someone else, receive a special mention – they need all the help they can get.
