
278 Discrete Event Simulation for Health Technology Assessment
reserve one or more worksheets purely for documentation, treating these
more as text documents than as calculation tables. If a macro language (e.g.,
VBA) is used in a spreadsheet to implement some of the required compo-
nents of the DES, then the same commenting particulars apply as for general
programming languages.
Aside from comments, the use of descriptive names for all the components
of the model will make it much more readable. The temptation to use intri-
cate abbreviations should be avoided as they will have meaning only to the
originator (and even then, it often is so only ...