Practical

Three habits that cut the tidying

The quality of the result depends more on what you send than on anything you can change afterwards.

Send the pages with the table, not the whole report

A forty-page document with one table on page thirty-one gives the reconstruction thirty pages of prose to misread. Extract the pages first — that tool runs in your browser and costs nothing in time.

Check the first column, then the last

Column drift, where values slide one cell sideways, shows up at the edges first. If the first and last columns are right, the middle almost always is.

Watch the repeated header

On a table that ran across several pages, the header line may appear more than once. Deleting those rows is faster than fixing anything else.