Excel Formula Formatting Hack

I learned a while ago that when you're typing in a cell in Excel, you can hit [Alt][Enter] to insert a line break without exiting the cell.

The other day I was working with a really long formula that used several different functions. It was really difficult to conceptualize what I was writing until I discovered that both 'line breaks' and 'spaces' didn't ruin or even alter my formula results. That allowed me to format the Excel formula in a way that almost resembled lines of code from MS Visual Studio.

(This example is a simple binary conversion formula.)

Because the spaces and line breaks don't alter the formula result, you can format it however you like it, it only takes a minute to accomplish, and the results make it a lot easier to come back later and decifer what it is you were trying to do.

Unless you'd rather look at something like this:

Formulas can get a lot more complicated than this at times, but I think you get the point.

Enjoy,

Garrett Woodroof

BTW: There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those that understand binary and those that do not. : )