Top 10 Best Practices for Reporting in Excel

Top 10 Best
Practices for
Reporting in Excel
 Top 10 Best Practices for Reporting in Excel

Top 10 Best Practices for

Reporting in Excel
Fast, accurate, and valuable reports are the goal in every reporting process, but sometimes ensuring your
reports meet all the criteria is daunting. If you have finance or accounting in your title, chances are that
you are intimately familiar with Pivot Tables, VLOOKUPs, and graphs in Microsoft Excel. Excel is part of your
everyday routine, and now you’re trying to make it work for reporting.

As experts in financial reporting and data management, we can tell you that great reporting starts with accurate
data and efficient reporting practices. That’s why we have put together a list of the top 10 best practices for
reporting in Excel. In this guide, you will learn how to make your reports more interactive, tune your reports
for performance, and increase report usability. Keep reading to discover the power of summarized data.
 Top 10 Best Practices for Reporting in Excel

Before you start creating a report, make sure you know what’s important to
your audience.
1. Identify the A report designed for your finance team should be detailed because they have

Needs of Your more advanced Excel skills and need to be able to make calculations and sort
through large amounts of data. People in your sales department are more visual
Audience and action-oriented, so they will respond better to charts and visualizations
instead of a jumble of numbers.

Have a quick conversation with the end user about how they plan to use the
report to support their daily tasks. You’ll be surprised at what you find out. You
may not have a complete understanding of the report until you ask the correct
series of questions. If you’re working on a new version of a current report, ask
what could be improved to make it easier to work with the data. Watch how
the user interacts with the report and think about how you might design the
interface for a smoother workflow.
 Top 10 Best Practices for Reporting in Excel

All great reports have to begin somewhere, and that somewhere is called the
design phase.
2. Create a Like a sketch before painting a masterpiece, a simple mock-up lets you practice

Mock-Up and perfect the overall design outside the constraints of the final medium. We
find it helpful to mock-up a report manually or with a simple design in Excel to
Report create a basic layout.

The mock-up process helps you visualize and situate key components in a logical
and usable way. As you play around with your design, keep your audience in mind
by selecting components, charts, and filters that they would find interesting and
useful. Review your mock-up with your audience to confirm that it meets their
needs.
 Top 10 Best Practices for Reporting in Excel

Consistent labeling conventions help users find what they are looking for
quickly.
3. Label Your To make it easier to identify and organize your report in the future, you should

Reports consider creating a header in your report that shows the report title, report
options, date and time, and a company logo. This small change can have a
huge impact on the effectiveness of your reporting. Clearly labeling elements,
like slicers and charts, also make it simpler for users to interact with and
analyze the data. Between worksheets, stick with similar naming conventions
to make cross-worksheet references easier. Excel Table and Named Ranges
are also two features that make referencing data easy in a report.
 Top 10 Best Practices for Reporting in Excel

Report grouping allows you to show detailed information without cluttering

the overall report.
4. Set Up Report It’s easy to go into information overload with rows and rows of data. In many

Grouping large reports, you need to present granular details and a high-level overview
at the same time. To group a set of data in Excel, highlight the rows or columns
you want to group, navigate to the data tab in the Excel ribbon, and select
“Group.” A keyboard shortcut for grouping is Alt + Shift + Right Arrow, which
will bring up the grouping dialog box.

Report grouping is purely an aesthetic function, and you may want to group or
ungroup the data in your report depending on your audience. Although some
users will want the full detail, others will prefer a more concise view.
 Top 10 Best Practices for Reporting in Excel

For a report to be beneficial, your users need to be able to select the information
that they want to see in a report.
5. Make Your In Excel, Microsoft offers some great filtering options to sort data and can help

Report users uncover trends quickly. Pivot Tables, for example, can single-handedly
transform a static report into a report that is inherently more useful and
Interactive dynamic. They allow you to summarize large sets of data easily and interact
with the data to do a simple analysis and uncover new insights.

Slicers are another easy way to make your reports more interactive. Slicers
include buttons that users can click to filter Pivot Table data. Slicers will allow
you to focus on a smaller portion of that data for in-depth analysis. It’s a quick
and highly effective way to filter a large set of data. Slicers can also show
the current filtering state so you can understand what exactly the Pivot Table
report shows.

In addition to filtering, Sparklines allows you to create tiny, colorful charts

within a worksheet cell to help you visualize data at a small scale.
 Top 10 Best Practices for Reporting in Excel

Just because your information starts in black and white doesn’t mean it should
stay that way.
6. Use Color for The proper use of color helps users make sense of data quickly and then

Emphasis identify the most important information. If you need to draw attention to a
specific metric that is under or over performing, we recommend using color
to highlight its importance. It is very common to use primary colors (blue,
red, yellow) and secondary colors (green, orange, purple) in reports and
dashboards to draw awareness. But keep in mind that specific colors can hold
meaning to your specific audience.

In Excel, you can use formatting and conditional formatting rules to highlight
data that you want to emphasize. We also recommend that you eliminate
gridlines in your workbook to give your reports a cleaner look. To do this,
select “View” from the Excel ribbon and uncheck the box for “Gridlines.”

Check out Microsoft’s guidelines for sorting and filtering by color for more
helpful hints.
 Top 10 Best Practices for Reporting in Excel

Say goodbye to slow Excel spreadsheets.

The more data and calculations you add to a workbook, the slower it gets.
7. Tune for Luckily, there are a few tips that you can keep in mind during the report design

Performance phase that will minimize this.

Volatile formulas and array formulas take up a lot of data. They recalculate every
time there is a change in the report, so if you’re worried about report speed,
be cautious of when you use these. Excel conditional formatting is considered
a volatile formula. You may not notice anything with small datasets, but you
will see a big difference in speed if applied to a larger dataset or in several
instances.

Lookup functions can also take a while to calculate, depending on the number
of cells selected. When using a Lookup function, you should be able to achieve
a performance increase by sorting selected data with the “Sort” function. By
changing the “Match” type on a Lookup function from exact to approximate,
you can save calculation time as well. If you’re still having issues with Lookup
performance, try using the “Match” and “Index” functions instead of VLOOKUP
and HLOOKUP.

One of the quickest ways to speed up your report performance in Excel is to

consolidate your data in one sheet. This depends on what your company is
using to manage your financial and operational data.
 Top 10 Best Practices for Reporting in Excel

Better business reporting isn’t complicated; it just requires an understanding

of your user needs, business goals, and operational processes.
8. Take Advantage If you are currently experiencing any issues with inaccurate data consolidation,

of Data time-consuming manual data entry, inconsistent report formatting, or a lack

of transparency within your Excel reporting practices, it might be time to
Analysis and consider how business intelligence (BI) and reporting solutions can help.

Visualization A BI and analytics solution is a smart, cost-effective way to build reports and
dashboards in Excel that are easier to consume and use. By bringing together
Tools your data into one platform, your users will be able to quickly access the data
they need and create insightful reports that can be used to make actionable
decisions without any worries of inaccuracies or errors.

As the global leader in ERP and EPM reporting solutions, we believe that
automation and real-time reporting is essential to continued growth and
profitability. We have worked with hundreds of businesses who have outgrown
their current reporting practices and helped them find a better solution that
fit their processes. Find out more about what BI can do for your business and
what to look for in a solution by downloading the white paper below.
 Top 10 Best Practices for Reporting in Excel

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 Top 10 Best Practices for Reporting in Excel

Diligence upfront will save headaches in the end, especially when dealing with
dynamic datasets.
9. Test the Have you ever asked yourself, “Does this number seem accurate?” When your

Validity of Your associates and your boss are making strategic business decisions based on the
information you provide, it’s important you get it right the first time. Testing
Spreadsheet the validity of your data calculations and formulas is absolutely critical.

In Excel, there are a few things you can do to double-check that your
information is accurate. First, you can run a quick calculation and compare
it with the original value to ensure your calculations are correct. You can run
the report by a co-worker to cross the t’s and dot the i’s in your analysis. You
can also test your formulas in Excel using the “Evaluate Formula” function in
the formulas tab. And last but not least, remember to verify filter operation by
changing report filters and running the report.
 Top 10 Best Practices for Reporting in Excel

Manually sharing Excel reports can compromise the integrity of your data.

Reports can be shared and distributed in many ways. They can be printed,
10. Share and parsed in HTML, posted to SharePoint, sent as an Excel workbook or PDF,

Distribute forwarded through email, shared on Dropbox, etc. With so many options, it’s
important to consider the best way to get your reports to the people who
Your Report need it most and in a format that works for them.

The problem with managing multiple Excel spreadsheets is that they can pass
through a ton of different hands. One version could be on a shared network,
whereas another is on someone’s desktop. Old reports are floating around,
and copies of reports are piling up all over servers, network drives, and local
machines. That’s why we recommend you take a step back and evaluate how
you share and distribute your Excel reports now. Always be sure that your
distribution plan fits the scenario and that there is no room for error.

BI solutions actually include scheduling features, which automatically refresh

your reports with up-to-the-minute data and distribute them to the proper
recipients. This allows you to automate your report distribution and free up
your time for more valuable tasks.
 Top 10 Best Practices for Reporting in Excel

Ready to Adopt
These Reporting Choose the Right
Best Practices? BI Platform for Your
When you’re ready to take the next step toward implementing these
Analytical Needs
reporting best practices into your organization, set some time aside
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 Top 10 Best Practices for Reporting in Excel

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