How to Review Work Quickly and Efficiently?

Checklists are a very effective method for me. Compile a list of things you need to check for along with the things you often forget. Add to it as mistakes occur. Automation and reconciliation processes are extremely helpful (when applicable).

Good idea! I'll try that.

Working on a Portfolio which includes Investment & Development deals. The Report is completly Excel based. For the first Review I got a checklist (already mentioned above). For the Final Review I'll print the Report (30 pages) on DIN A3 and take my time to minimize the amount of mistakes near to Zero. Don't know why, but to print it in A3 works really good for me.

Print off hard copy, single sided, full colour. Flip through every page and check for formatting, page numbers, alignment etc. Once you've done that check go through in detail and review the actual wording for typos. Reason I do it in this order is if I'm doing 1 single review, formatting errors will jump out at me and I might miss something in the text.

Absolutely print off hard copies though. Errors scream at you on paper in a way they just don't do on screen.

I echo what has already been said about printing it out. Spell check too (F7 in excel). One thing to remember when working with excel is to take a step back when you are done. Do the results seem to make sense from a macro view? I find that this is an easy thing to do with someone else's work, but much harder with your own. If you can work on this skill you will avoid many mistakes.

Here is a list of checks from an insane-person email I sent to an analyst a couple of weeks ago relating to a Word document (I have become that which I hate):

Text Alignment o (Center/Left/Justified) Some items were justified in this report when some other areas were left or center aligned

Consistent Titles o If something is capitalized, keep it capitalized every time; if it is not, then keep it lowercased

Consistent Page Margins o Page margins should be uniform, set from the very beginning of writing the document, and then never changed again

Consistent Spacing o This is another item to set at the beginning of the document, we uses a default margin in most reports, but if writing for a client just make sure whatever you use is consistent

Consistent Font o Also, the font for similar sections should be similar (headers should be the same size / font / style)

Consistent Bullets o Use only a few different styles of bullets, and use them consistently in similar cases

Acronyms o First time, use the full name of anything that will be an acronym later, then use the acronym from then on

Page Spillover o If a section leading into a list (“in the list below”) and the actual list split pages, move the intro text to the next page o If a table must span multiple pages, ensure that the “Repeat Header Rows” function is used

There were a few other elements of style that I noticed and don’t look for every time, but wanted to make a note on:

Charts o As a personal preference, I hate charts as interactive objects in a Word document because they can easily have their size/alignment/other characteristic edited and then the chart won’t match the rest of the visuals—it’s easier to copy and paste them as an Enhanced Metafile o This issue was clear in this paper, as some charts were truncated (they didn’t show the whole set of data or the legend) and generally weren’t the same size

Use of Columns o Columns will always mess up your document, they’re almost impossible to limit to a portion of the paper, and someone else trying to edit the document isn’t going to know why their mouse is going wild when they try to click somewhere

Footers o The “footer” in the document we received was not a footer, but was just a table at the bottom of each page. This led to issues every time something was added to a section as the footer was moved and the page number was no longer accurate

Active Voice / Concise Language o Re-read everything you’ve written asking if you can say the same message in half as many words