Excel Professional – Design

I cannot stress to strongly the necessity for a design phase.

In today’s world the impulse is to race to the computer and start hammering out ideas on the keyboard. This aproach is guaranteed to cost you ten times as much time as if you sat down with paper and pencil and assembled your thoughts.

I know, sadlyt, that you don’t believe me; I too feel that urge to have something to show for my thoghts. When I have a brilliant idea for a computer application, I want to see the first results as soon a sposisble.

It doesn’t work that way.

Some people say “Oh! I wouldn’t possibly know how to write it out in English”, to which I reply, “If you can’t express your ideas in your mother tongue, what makes you think you can express them in a foreign language (Excel)”. To make it worse, unlike human cultures, your host in the computer is absolutely, terrifyingly unforgiving.

I have struggled in France, Germany, Spain and Singapore, so trust me, people understand my broken language attempts much better than do computers.

Above I have reproduced a 1-page outline of a project I need to build. There’s no meed for you to read my handwriting at this stage, and we will be coming back to this image.

I wanted to show you that every spreadsheet project starts with a single sheet of paper, on which are expressed the overall goals of the project.

If you can’t condense your idea sto a single shete (the 60-second presentation, if you will), then you don’t understand your prohect well enough yet to start coding in Excel.

Here is the Project

I want a workbook that will generate a quotation for a tour for a number of people. Guides, cars (and drivers!) and hotels must be taken into account, as should meals.

On the sheet above the left-hand column identifies four types of stuff, and we will describe them in detail shortly, but for now, just know that I spent a few minutes jotting down my thoughts on paper. If you aren’t prepared to do that, then you are in the wrong course!

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