When you're running a business, Excel is a great tool to keep track of sales and expenses.

However, if you're entering lots of data into a worksheet, it's easy to make a typing mistake, or put information into the wrong cell.

To help prevent data entry errors, you can create drop down lists in the Excel sheet. These are made with the data validation feature.



Then, if you or your assistant are...

If you're keeping track of your online product sales in Excel, you can use the built-in features to make the data entry easier.

For example, on one worksheet, you can store a table with your product names, and the product prices.



Use a Formula to Find the Price

In another sheet, enter the name of the product that you just sold. Then, use Excel's VLOOKUP function...

If you're selling items online, you can usually export the sales date, and open the exported file in Excel.

Hopefully your list of sales will be very long! That's good for your bank account, but a long list can be hard to read on the computer screen.

To make the list easier to read, you can do two things:

1. Create an Excel table, and use the built-in styles, to add bands of color
2. Add lines to separate the dates, to quickly show where the sales dates start

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