Microsoft® Office Excel 2003 Inside Out

Have You Allowed Room to Insert New Rows and Columns?

It's critical to allow for expansion and editing after your worksheet is assembled. It's generally a good idea to add a few extra rows and columns to the detail area and to keep totals separated from the detail data by a row or column or two, if possible. One of the most common editing actions you'll perform is inserting new rows and columns. Excel has gotten a lot smarter about this over the years, making obsolete some of the rules of thumb that we oldtimers have collected. But it's still possible to mess up.

There's a rather famous folkloric tale about an accounting person who inserted a row at the bottom of a range of cells but forgot to adjust the totals formulas and was fired because his ...