Musings on project management: EXCEL watch window

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

EXCEL watch window

If you've ever managed a project with a really large data set, say the payroll for a bunch of 1099 developers, or the sales records that you're trying to translate and import to a spreadsheet, you may need to watch a couple of important cells to let you know what's really going on:

Summary totals;
error codes;
record totals, etc.

Excel gives the PMO a convenient tool in the Watch Window, found on the tool ribbon with Formulas/Formula Auditing

To use it, just open the watch window by clicking the icon, then click on Add Watch in the Watch Window, and then select some cells.

Thereafter, every time you click on Watch Window in the Formula ribbon, it brings up your list with the latest values. My only irritation with the functionality is that the change is not time tagged. Nonetheless, pretty convenient to use.