Designing Effective Worksheets

The City of Desert Park

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Desert Park, Arizona, is a thriving city with a population of just under 1 million in an ideal location serving major markets in the western United States and Mexico. Desert Park's temperate year-round climate attracts both visitors and businesses, and it is one of the most popular vacation destinations in the world. The city expects and has plenty of space for long-term growth, and most of the undeveloped land already has a modern infrastructure and assured water supply in place.

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You can explore options in Excel by recalculating formulas that depend on other formulas. To take advantage of this powerful feature, think of yourself as a designer who determines a patterna pattern that can easily be expanded. Features such as copying, charting, sorting, formatting, subtotaling, and exporting work most efficiently if you arrange your data in a group of adjacent cells. Other simple groups of related titles, values, and formulas can exist on the same worksheet if there is at least one row or column of empty cells between them.

For example, in this chapter, you will enter the first value in a column title and then fill in a sequence of titles with a single command. You will write a formula once and then fill it into adjacent cells where all of the formulas will be automatically recalculated every time you change a value in a single cell. You will design groups of data with headings and formulas so that the data can be effectively charted. Worksheets and the charts that are based on them can be used to try out different values, compare options, and then observe the effect on the formulas and charts.

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