If you provide only numbers without much text in
your spreadsheets, you risk poor
communication. With all of the
(unfortunate) poor communication that we all experience in our business lives,
it certainly behooves us to make our Excel masterpieces as clear and concise as
possible!
One way to do this in Excel is to Mix Text with
Formulas. By using the Concatenation (via Ampersands)
feature along with Formulas, you can build interactive messages within your
reports, making them easier to understand, and eye-catching in the process.
To
see where I’m going with this, Click and Enlarge the spreadsheet image
below. In this instance we are presuming
that you have a table of data and a formula that returns the sales for the 4th
quarter in cell G6. The formula in G6 interacts with the
dropdown box in cell C4, (Use Validation to make a quick
dropdown list), to display the 4th Quarter Sales by Rep.
Now,
let’s make it Really Cool! As you can
see in the formula bar, a Text string is used in conjunction with
the name being shown in the dropdown box in C4: =“4th Quarter
Sales for ”&C4&“:”
This produces an Interactive Message that works with the dropdown box and the results of the formula used in cell G4. Be sure to leave a Space after the end of the text string to create a proper sentence (you don’t want it to be clunky).
Pretty cool, eh? Try using Ampersands with Text Strings combined with formulas in your next report. The result will be a Highly Interactive and Sophisticated report (that may even impress your boss…).
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