Organizing Tabular Information

A well-organized table should adhere to the following guidelines:

• Each column in the first row should hold a label that describes, uniquely and unambiguously, the kind of information the column contains. This header row isn’t absolutely required, but it makes life easier. And if you don’t supply your own header labels, Excel simply creates them for you—using nondescriptive text such as Column 1, Column 2, and so on.

• Each column should contain one kind of information. In a team roster, for example, one column might hold last names, another first names, a third telephone numbers. Be sure that any element that you might want to manipulate independently gets its own column. If your telephone list contains numbers in more than one area code, for example, and you want to be able to sort or filter on the basis of the area codes, don’t bundle the area codes in with the numbers; give them their own column.

• The table should occupy a contiguous block of cells; that is, it should not include any blank rows. If you think you might ever filter the table (that is, restrict it to showing only those rows that meet some criterion), don’t put any data to the right or left of the table. Filtering hides rows, without regard to anything that might lie alongside the table.