On Wed, 16 May 2007, in microsoft.public.excel.charting,
Jon Peltier said:

If 'Keep It Simple' means use an extra sheet, then use an extra sheet. I
can't believe how many people are so reluctant to do so even when the
benefits are explained.

I sympathise to some extent; there's a human instinct to thriftiness
that doesn't deal with computer "space" very well. An excellent example
of this is my company (and other companies) who periodically commit vast
numbers of paid company man-minutes every year to the project of
clearing old email out of the servers, when the price of computer
storage nowadays is such that simply buying more space would be much
cheaper. But you can't convince the budget holders of that.

And then again, there's an instinct that mimics the reluctance to
duplicate records in databases, for fear that the duplicates could fall
out of sync. The answer to that is the relational database, that holds
one unique source of each bit of information and feeds many instances
where that bit needs to be displayed. Users want the table and the graph
to directly read the same cell, lest their table and their graph
accidentally end up telling different stories.

But good spreadsheet design is easily able to achieve the same goal even
when cells have been duplicated "unnecessarily": they will eventually
all lead back to the ur-source, and there's no inevitable reason why the
helper cells should be hard to sense-check for that goal.

--
Del Cotter
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