Hi All,
Wondering if naming cells (ie. "Lease_Start", "Rent_Growth"), etc. in Excel is considered a a good or bad practice to pick up?
Pros:
- Seems helpful to show what info you're referencing to, especially in those long IF statements.
- You don't need to worry about locking cells (big advantage)
Cons:
- Might be difficult for new viewers of the spreadsheet (senior associates, MDs, etc.) to find the original cell
- Comes off as lazy? Idk.
- Time-intensive upfront to sit there and name every cell.
I'm curious to what you all think. Is it a best practice or a bad habit that we shouldn't pick up? Thanks in advance.
I think I remember trying this before. Never really caught onto it because I think it ended up being too time consuming, especially if I needed to quickly churn out a model to better understand something.
I hate models with named cells. Makes auditing it a fucking nightmare
I personally never use it for the reasons people list above. Models, at least in banking, are never solely owned or viewed by just one person, meaning that auditing is critical. I’ve had some people argue that cells that reference things like your WACC or Circuit Breaker should be named, but I personally think saving time is never worth sacrificing transparency or ease of auditing.
If you are doing anything with vba, named ranges make it so your vba code still works if you insert columns or rows into a sheet.
No, also because it takes up a lot of data
Maybe for a case study to show you know what your model is doing and where the info is coming from but I don't think it's practical in real life. Especially if an MD is requesting edits asap - too time consuming. Also too many people coming in and out of the model and too many fat fingers associates/VP's around to mess it up.
I thought they were personally helpful if I'm spending a lot of time in a model. But being on the receiving end of it makes life difficult. For that reason I dont use them.
Thanks all! These responses were helpful. Looks like it's not really a best practice. I agree on all the points mentioned.
My team only uses one named cell, and it's for the square footage of the building. Otherwise, it's an auditing nightmare.
no
After cleaning up a model with 500 named ranges and cells which was causing it to crash everytime it opened. PLEASE no named cells or ranges.
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