Layout Layout Layout!

The most important thing in creating and setting up a Microsoft Excel workbook is correctly laying out the sheets in a respectable manner. Generally, with the majority of my workbooks I have 4 sheets for a set of data. 'Overview', 'Data', 'Summary' and 'Graphs'. For the purpose of this topic I have used an example

Overview
This sheet contains an overview of what is contained in the workbook and 3 hyperlinks to the other 3 sheets outlined below. View an example
Data
This sheet contains the table of information. This sheets should be laid out so that headings are in row 1 in bold and there are no blank rows of data, otherwise Excel will no consider any data below the blank row a part of the 'current' dataset. View an example
Summary
The summary sheets contains the information that you wish to analyse; it may be the total sales by month by Sales Rep.. I always like to have the months running down the rows and the other category (Sales Rep. for example) running across the columns. This is because there are at least 12 months that you wish to analyse and generally it is easier to read more than 8 categories downward. If there are more than 12 categories (such as Sales Rep. than the months can go across. View an example
Graphs
These are the graphs that are generated from the summarised information on the 'Summary' sheet. View an example