Applying name based prefixes to spreadsheets
- Eliot Muir
Most spreadsheets have the ability to defined “named” fields in them.
So for instance if sales tax is 13% then you might want to name a field “SalesTax” and set the value to 13%.
This works well initially. But as the spreadsheet gets more complicated with many many different variables then we run into the same problem as for any other piece of code. It becomes difficult to know where named values are coming from and it becomes easy to break the spreadsheet by changing names and not realizing you broke formula which were using the old names.
So prefix namespaces for separating concerns to the rescue!
One can:
Have tabs in spreadsheets which can be named with prefixes
Use those same prefixes to name the named values in that tab.
Tada - a much more maintainable approach for spreadsheets!
Excel even has the ability to to search and replace for a given name so if you pick the wrong prefix - no big deal to change the usage globally across the spreadsheet. For example:
