Maximize Excel: Airtight Spreadsheets
Presented by David H. Ringstrom, CPA
 
Event Date/Time: 05/9/25 12:00 PM Eastern
Duration: 100 minutes
 
In this comprehensive presentation, you’ll learn from Excel expert David Ringstrom, CPA, a variety of tricks and techniques you can implement to improve the integrity of your Excel spreadsheets as well as audit spreadsheets created by others. David demonstrates how to use several Excel features and functions, preserve key formulas, build resilience into your spreadsheets, and more.
 
David demonstrates every technique at least twice: first, on a PowerPoint slide with numbered steps, and second, in the subscription-based Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) version of Excel. David draws your attention to any differences in the older versions of Excel (2021, 2019, 2016 and earlier) during the presentation as well as in his detailed handouts. David also provides an Excel workbook that includes most of the examples he uses during the webcast.
 
Microsoft 365 is a subscription-based product that provides new feature updates as often as monthly. Conversely, the perpetual licensed versions of Excel have feature sets that don't change. Perpetual licensed versions have year numbers, such as Excel 2021, Excel 2019, and so on.
 
Who should attend:
Practitioners who want to learn how to improve the integrity of their Excel worksheets and how to audit spreadsheets other users create.
 
Topics typically covered:
 
• Building resilience into spreadsheets by avoiding daisy-chained formulas.
 
• Displaying alternate results with XLOOKUP by populating the If_Not_Found argument instead of using IFERROR or IFNA.
 
• Enabling a workbook-specific setting that will create an automatic back-up of critical workbooks.
 
• Enabling selected users to access protected areas of a worksheet by way of the Allow Users to Edit Ranges feature.
 
• Improving the integrity of many Excel features by placing column headings within a single row instead of spanning two or more rows.
 
• Improving the integrity of spreadsheets by using SUMIF to look up values in a more flexible fashion than VLOOKUP.
 
• Learning a simple design technique that greatly improves the integrity of Excel’s SUM function.
 
• Learning about the IFNA function available in Excel 2013 and later.
 
• Learning how VLOOKUP stops looking after it finds an initial match within a list.
 
• Limiting access to sensitive workbooks by way of password protection.
 
• Preserving key formulas using hide and protect features.
 
• Preventing errors from the start by choosing from thousands of free Excel spreadsheet templates.
 
Learning objectives:
• Apply techniques and features that will improve the integrity of your Excel spreadsheets.
• Define how to use the SUBTOTAL function to create a resilient means of adding up multiple sections of a spreadsheet.
• State how to hide and unhide multiple worksheets with a single command in Excel.
 
 
Level:
Basic

NASBA Field of Study:
Computer Software & Applications (2 hours)
 
Program Prerequisites:
None
 
Advance Preparation:
None