Data organization in spreadsheets

Abstract

Spreadsheets are widely used software tools for data entry, storage, analysis, and visualization. Focusing on the data entry and storage aspects, this paper offers practical recommendations for organizing spreadsheet data to reduce errors and ease later analyses. The basic principles are: be consistent, write dates like YYYY-MM-DD, don't leave any cells empty, put just one thing in a cell, organize the data as a single rectangle (with subjects as rows and variables as columns, and with a single header row), create a data dictionary, don't include calculations in the raw data files, don't use font color or highlighting as data, choose good names for things, make backups, use data validation to avoid data entry errors, and save the data in plain text file.