Spreadsheets

About Spreadsheets

Short answer: most spreadsheet work is one of four jobs, a budget, a tracker, a report, or an invoice, and each has a formula set you can set up once and reuse. Learn the lookup, the conditional sum, and the pivot table, and the rest is formatting.

What you’ll find here: step-by-step guides for the formulas that matter, quick fixes for the errors that cost you an afternoon, templates with the formulas already built in, and straight comparisons when you are choosing between Excel, Google Sheets, and Airtable.

Who it’s for: freelancers and small teams who run budgets, trackers, or reporting in a spreadsheet and never had anyone walk them through it.

Which spreadsheet should you actually use?

The choice matters less than the structure you build inside it. A clean sheet with one header row, consistent dates, and no merged cells will survive a move between tools. A sheet with merged headers, blank rows used as separators, and totals typed as text will break every time you try to pivot it. If you are choosing now, pick the one your collaborators already open, then keep the data tidy so switching later stays cheap.

Why do formulas fail, and what fixes them?

The same four failures cause most of the wasted afternoons. A lookup returns #N/A because the key format differs between tables, one side text and the other a number, or because a trailing space survived a copy. A conditional sum returns zero because the criteria range and the sum range are different lengths, so the rows no longer line up. A calculation shows a date where you expected a number, which means the cell is formatted as a date. A split or import scrambles columns because a delimiter inside the data was treated as a column break. None of these are rare or mysterious, and each has a check you can run in under a minute. The habit that prevents all four is keeping one clean table per sheet, with data starting in row one and no formatting rows above it.

What should you automate first?

Automate the thing you rebuild most often, not the thing that sounds most impressive. For most small teams that is a repeating report: the same export, cleaned and summarised the same way, every week. Next comes anything with a deadline attached, invoices and reminders, because forgetting those costs money. Templates come third, since a template only helps once you know what the columns should be. Automating a process you have not yet run by hand usually produces a slower version of the manual job. Pick the report you already build weekly, write down the steps, and then replace one step at a time.

Where can you verify this yourself?

• Google Sheets function list: every function with syntax and examples, from the vendor.
• Google Sheets: VLOOKUP: the official reference for the lookup that causes most #N/A errors.
• Google Workspace learning centre: the vendor’s own training material for Docs, Sheets, and Drive.
• Microsoft 365 Excel: the official product documentation and templates.

Reviewed by the StackTrekker editorial team. Last updated: October 1, 2026.