Excel annoyance: How to maintain formulas in a ledger?
- by davidcl
A common use of Excel is to create a spreadsheet which functions as a transaction ledger of some kind, where one or more fields in each row is calculated by adding a value or values from the current row to a value from the previous row.
For example, if column C holds the value of a transaction and column D holds the balance, then the formula in row D3 might be =D2+C3. This formula would be repeated for every row in the ledger.
A common annoyance when maintaining this type of spreadsheet is that if you insert a row into the middle of such a ledger, that row may be skipped when calculating the balance-- the formulas in the subsequent row have to be updated along with the formulas in the inserted row.
Do you have any techniques for avoiding these problems?
