I fully agree, things can get out of hand in spreadsheets. I've built my fair share of such spreadsheets, and as penance, I'm learning R. The thing with Excel

I fully agree, things can get out of hand in spreadsheets. I've built my fair share of such spreadsheets, and as penance, I'm learning R. The thing with Excel is there's a low barrier to entry, but there are a lot of differences between a great spreadsheet and a bad one. Somewhat like a junior vs senior developer, the quality of code/spreadsheet depends on what they know, how well they can troubleshoot, and how good of a system they can imagine (to then replicate as much as possible). For example, most people are entirely unaware that Tables exist in Excel. When you want the sum of a column, rather than writing =SUM(F7:F39) and cursing when you realize you added 10 more rows and that's why the sum is not updating, you can do =SUM(tbl_Sales[SalePrice]), and when you add 10 rows, the table will automatically expand. Suddenly your formulas are somewhat self-documenting, regardless of which sheet holds tbl_Sales. Crtl+T when you've selected your data, or Insert -> Tables -> Table. You can also make named ranges, which I would say is an analog between using {a, b, c, tempVar} versus well named variables in normal programming. You can also trace dependents/precedents, showing arrows for how the data flows throughout the spreadsheet. Formula -> Trace Precedents/Dependents.