Discussion on:

10 Excel formatting decisions that can have unfortunate repercussions

Good tips here!! Yes formatting is important, and when constantly importing into Excel it would be nice to use template technology and save alot of time!! see www.datapresentation.com/products/ez-format.cfm for a complete solution.

Very good tips, all of them. A few more tips / comments.

About #4:
I use the custom number format ;;; to prevent the values from displaying in cells.
If the sheet is protected, the value won't display in the formula bar as well.

About #8:
Does this refer to MS-Word ? I haven't heard of page-numbering schemes in Excel.

And one thing I prefer: in horizontal cell alignment, use "Centre-across-selection", instead of "Merge-and-centre" because of problems with using the latter option during column selection, data sorting, and other unexpected behaviour.
Even merging cells across rows should be avoided, except in limited situations (like dashboard design).

I recently had an issue with the thousands separator ( comma ) with a spreadsheet I was using that needed to be saved to a CSV file to be imported by another program. It treated the comma in a number cell as a delimiter and got imported wrong in the destination program's database. Example, if a cell contained 1234 which was formatted to 1,234. It separated the 1 and the 234. That caused a MAJOR issue.

Excel exported the commas?

Be careful with background fill colors. Unlike font colors, when you do a sort the background colors don't get sorted with the data. The fill color remains in the cell, regardless of what data gets sorted in or out of it.