A spreadsheet is often a very handy tool for analysis and reporting. With MS Excel, there are loads of cool features and still newer ones being added on with newer versions of it. But imagine the plight of having to do an analysis and there is a data overload in that Excel workbook. Ok, you played with some of the possibilities in MS Excel, discovered few techniques of “doing that in a smarter way” and later on while making the presentation, someone (or you yourself) discovers some faulty data. First thing that comes to your mind is “Oh no, I’ve to do that again?”. Well with massive data crunching, there often comes situations like these.

When you see massive chunks of formatted data and you know that something is wrong out there, there needs to be a way of proving or disproving your hypothesis. You have to find out fault in this huge chunk and there you would be in a very sorry position. Finding out problems and then the approach to rectify the problem is a pain. Under such situation, few of the common things to watch out for would be:

• disect the formula(e) used part by part.
• check out the references in the functions, if any.
• check out the ranges in the functions, if any.
• Be cautious of the data obtained using lookup’s and pivot tables’s. They are very handy tools but could lead one to some surprising (and unlikely) data.
• Try redoing the same for one chunk of data and then compare with the exisiting ones to find if there is any dissimilarity.

Whatever be the scenario I have tried to sum up the mishaps most often overlooked in these few points and I am in no mood to elucidate over this now. These are what one may like to say “Just in case!!”
So next time you are asked to collect and make a presentation out of those horrible looking data, check out the points I have highlighted……just in case.

http://uk.blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-ptDisCM1fqvF3xSgHUbOU2Q-?cq=1&p=3

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