Using “Names” In Excel To Improve Efficiency

I’m sure that many of you have these incredibly complex spreadsheets that become bigger, more complex and more difficult to manage over the years. Those create many issues, one of the main ones being that before making even a small change, you have to figure out what kind of impact this might have. Changing even one sheet can create issues. At times you might also want to change how the file is build without having to change hundreds of links. How would you proceed? I like to use names. It’s quite easy to set up, you can simply go into the following excel menu:

I’ll give you one example. If I have a huge financial spreadsheet with many links towards the CAD/USD rate, that might look like this:

So in hundreds of places I might link to this cell. If I were to change the location of this link, it would force me to update all links. Currently when I add a link in another sheet, it would look something like this:

=Sheet1!B3

What I can do though is to create a name, by clicking on the link mentioned above:

Then, I can simply link to that name:

=CADUSDRate

A major advantage of course is that I could at any point change the location of that rate and instead of changing tons of links, simply go back into “insert/name” and modify the location of that name.

It’s a quick and easy way to make it easier to keep your spreadsheet accurate over long periods of time.

Let me know if you have any questions!

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