Who Is the Audience?

Are you building a worksheet for your own use, or will you be sharing it with others online or in printed form? In other words, does the worksheet need to look marvelous, or is fancy formatting optional? Do you need to create a big-picture summary or overview for others? It's definitely important to consider your audience when deciding how your worksheet is going to look.

If you're close to the data in your worksheet-that is, this is your job-you probably think the details are a lot more interesting than others might. You need to think like the people you will be presenting this information to and tell them what they need to know-no more, and certainly no less. If your worksheet contains a lot of data that your audience doesn't really need to see, which is almost always the case, you can create a summary sheet (like the one shown in Figure 5-3) specifically for the purpose of mass consumption. If your worksheet will have more than one type of audience, create different summary sheets for each group, all using the same underlying data.