tomfoolery wrote: ↑Sun Sep 19, 2021 4:21 pm
Like most here, I keep track of a lot of information in spreadsheets. On the financial front, things like asset allocation of the PP, expense ratios for ETFs, rebalance bands, dates of IRA contributions/conversions, CPI-U, etc.
But I also keep spreadsheets of things like to do lists, recipes, interesting articles I might want to share with my email-based message group, etc.
I started to feel overwhelmed with all of my spreadsheets so I started making a spreadsheet to track the other spreadsheets and that's when I knew I was in trouble!
I hesitated to split my spreadsheet into different files. So far I've preferred just to use different sheets in one file, to make it easier to search. But it seems like Microsoft Excel is starting to get mad at me now that I've gone past the 500 tab marker. I would think the file could just keep getting bigger but I guess how the program loads the file, if it's too big.
So I started splitting my spreadsheets up. One financial spreadsheet with 127 tabs (my biggest since it has the most information), recipes has 43 tabs (based on food types, allergen info, and culture of origin), and I'm still going through the rest.
Before I get too deep into this maybe some here want to share their organization methodology with the group so I don't have to start over yet again!
Until the I decided to leave the job last year....I had been at that job nearly 12 years.
During all that time I used only two basic Excel files. One was basically to keep track of my time and what I was doing with that time. The other was for doing all my actual work.
After 12 years that one work file had many, many, many tabs.
The way I was able to quickly zip around to any of them was to create a well-organized list of all those worksheets with each tab name on the list being hyperlinked to the tab.
Major benefits from having all in one worksheet was if i was working from home....all I had to remember to do was have just have access to those two files. I did not have to think of which innumerable files to make sure I had. Finally, it made foolproof linking between the various worksheets. When I used to do that by linking between files that would oftentimes become a disaster if you forgot to always have the two files open at the same time when you were making changes to one of the files.
I have been the financial consultant for another organization since July 2009. During all that time the bookkeeper and myself have shared just one Excel file for all the work each of us need to do in Excel. Same setup. Well organized listing of all tabs with hyperlinks for each name on the list to its matching worksheet.
I think the file I used for almost 12 years had over 400 worksheets in it and it is currently 87MB in size. Does not either or open or save as quickly as a much smaller Excel file does. It also seems to use a lot of RAM when it is open.