
Show HN: Secrets of Mastering Excel - LeonB
Inspired by a comment thread yesterday [1] I made this mini site:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;excel.secretgeek.net&#x2F;<p>Reason:<p>I often want to share Joel Spolsky&#x27;s famous &quot;You Suck at Excel&quot; video tutorial with &quot;important&quot; business people inside the large enterprise where I work.<p>But it would be easily misconstrued as trolling if I sent a business customer a URL that literally tells them, right in the heading, that they &quot;suck&quot; at excel.<p>So, as advised by user @TuringTest (in the thread mentioned above) I created a mini site, on its own sub-domain, that is palatable to a business mindset, and <i>brutally</i> overlaid a heading that says &quot;Secrets of Mastering Excel&quot; right over the top of the &quot;You Suck at Excel&quot; heading.<p>Now I&#x27;ve got something I can recommend to business people without causing disharmony. And I can leave a link to it in my email signature at work, to nudge my colleagues to improve their Excel game.<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20418313
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rahimnathwani
Great idea!

Note: some of the information you linked is out of date, e.g. the linked
summary says 'You have to sort the LookupLabels by name for match to work'.
But MATCH() takes a third optional argument (match type) which, if set to 0,
means you don't need to pre-sort your Lookup labels, and you have no risk of
having an approximate match returned.

I wrote a short blog post with the Excel advice I most commonly give to
colleagues, or when I've reviewed people's Excel sheets as part of a training
session: [https://www.encona.com/posts/excel-best-
practices](https://www.encona.com/posts/excel-best-practices)

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LeonB
I like your best practices, and I like the format that you've used ("Don't do
this; Do this instead; Why").

