There are only a few people who learn Excel in an academic setting. Most of us pick it up as we go, learning just enough to get through whatever task is in front of us. That usually means relying on search engines like Google and Bing, websites, and YouTube tutorials to figure things out.
It’s great that we can build our Excel skills this way, but it also comes with a downside. Along the way, we tend to pick up inefficient habits. Most of these habits won’t stop you from getting your work done, but they’ll make the process slower and more stressful than it needs to be.
Once you identify and unlearn them, you put yourself in a much better position to use Excel more effectively.
Holding onto merged cells
Pretty sheets aren’t worth broken filters and sorting
If you care a lot about how your sheet looks, merging your cells in Excel to get a polished layout will seem like an obvious choice. However, merged cells tend to cause more problems than they solve. They break sorting, confuse filters, and often make formulas behave unpredictably.
In practice, this means you have to keep rearranging your data whenever you merge cells, just to ensure your formulas and filters continue to interpret the contents correctly as a single value within a defined row or column. Alternatively, you end up avoiding applying any functionality to those cells altogether.
What I’ve learned to do instead is use Center Across Selection, which gives you almost the same visual result without disrupting your spreadsheet’s structure. You can find this by navigating to the Home tab, expanding the Alignment group, and then selecting Center Across Selection under Horizontal.
Keeping everything on one sheet
Tabs exist for a reason
Keeping your raw data, calculations, charts, reports, and dashboards all on a single tab might seem efficient at first, but it’ll eventually make your work harder to audit, update, and share. A better approach is to think in layers, where each part of your workflow has its own space.
I now keep one tab for raw data (this one remains untouched), another for calculations and logic, and a separate one for the final report that others will interact with. When you separate your data from your presentation like this, you can update one without accidentally breaking the other, and everything becomes much easier to follow.
Burying my assumptions
If it’s important, it deserves its own cell
Imagine this formula sits in cell P3 of a sheet:
=J3*0.075
At first glance, the immediate question is what the 0.075 represents. It could be a tax rate, a commission, or just a number you decide works for a particular calculation. The problem is that there’s no context, so anyone reading the sheet has to guess.
If you’ll reference a value more than once, it deserves its own cell with a clear label. In this case, you could place “Discount for top customers” in O1 and “0.075” in P1, making the meaning immediately obvious. This approach makes your logic easier to understand and far easier to update later.
If you can’t avoid hard-coding a number into a formula, the least you can do is flag it. Highlight the cell with a different text color or add a comment so it’s always clear what that number represents.
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Writing unreadable formulas
Clear formulas beat impressive ones every time
If you learned Excel through trial and error, there’s a good chance you’re drawn to complex formulas, if only to prove you can write them. These kinds of formulas look like layers of nested IFs wrapped inside an IFERROR and combined with an INDEX-MATCH, all crammed into a single line that’s sixty characters wide.
If you can write and debug formulas like that, that’s great. However, if you intend to share your sheet with someone else, this complexity will likely create many problems.
Modern Excel offers better ways to structure your logic clearly and easily. Functions like LET allow you to define variables within a formula, so each step is easier to follow. Named ranges replace cryptic cell references with meaningful labels, so instead of pointing to something like “$QR$200,” you can use a name like “TaxRate.” Once you start using these tools, your formulas become much easier to read and maintain, for both you and your collaborators.
Overusing volatile functions
A slow spreadsheet is a frustrating spreadsheet
Functions like OFFSET and INDIRECT can be very useful, but they come with a trade-off. They recalculate every time anything changes in your workbook, not just when the cells they depend on are updated. In a large file, that constant recalculation can make your spreadsheet slower and less responsive.
They can also be harder to read, especially for someone who didn’t build the sheet. Before reaching for these functions, it helps to consider whether a structured table reference or a non-volatile alternative could achieve the same result more cleanly. In many cases, it can, and your workbook will be better for it.
Ignoring documentation and version history
Good spreadsheets explain themselves
Well-structured spreadsheets usually include a cover or information tab that explains what the file is for, what each sheet contains, where any external data comes from, and who built it. It only takes a few minutes to put together, but it can save you and anyone else working with the file a lot of confusion later.
It’s also a good habit to save dated versions of your file. While turning on autosave ensures your changes are captured, and Excel keeps a version history, relying on that alone can make it harder to quickly compare different stages of your work. Saving a clearly named version at key points makes that process much easier.
For example, saving a local copy of an online file as “Budget_Q2_2026” before continuing with updates gives you a reliable reference point if you need to revisit or compare figures later.
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Better spreadsheets start with better habits
As I’ve mentioned, none of these habits makes you bad at Excel. In fact, most people who become excellent at Excel start with them. These habits are often just part of learning on the go and figuring things out as you need them.
However, once you’ve found your footing, it makes sense to refine how you work. As you unlearn these habits, you’ll notice how much smoother and more efficient your experience becomes. From there, it becomes easier to spot other areas to improve, and you naturally continue building better habits over time.
