ACCT 088 De Anza College Hardcoding vs Linking Discussion & Replies Main Post 1. In the professional world of accounting, working with Excel workbooks wil

ACCT 088 De Anza College Hardcoding vs Linking Discussion & Replies Main Post

1. In the professional world of accounting, working with Excel workbooks will be an integral aspect of your day to day duties. Unfortunately, you will eventually open a workbook to find everything hard-coded and not know where any of the numbers came from! Imagine being told to finish a tax return or audit workbook; however, upon opening the file all the numbers are directly typed into the fields without any indication of where the date was gathered from.

With this aforementioned scenario laid out, please discuss the advantages/disadvantages of hard-coding values (the situation explained above) into Excel vs linking cells to dependent cells in Excel.

Replies to Peers

2. Reply to one peer. In your reply, most substantive (Links to an external site.) explanations of a topic are precise, meaningful, at least 3-5 sentences, involve concrete examples (‘having a firm basis in reality’), and do not assume the reader is already familiar with the topic, but may assume they are familiar with the prerequisites and material leading up to this portion of the course. A half page of average writing, about 200-400 words, is usually the what it takes to be solidly substantive.

The concept of hard-coding is applicable when we want to use constant values in our excel formula. Typing the specific amount in to the cell would work in this case. I would agree with Professor Hatter that the hard-coding is manageable for a small excel sheet. For example if you want to keep track of your personal payroll . You can input the specific tax percentage to keep track of your earning. Since this value is constant, you will not have to worry about changing it. However, as life is changing , we may also change our martial status or allowance . This would differently change our tax percentage. Do we need to make a new excel file with different constants?

The alternative method is to use linking or preference techniques. I would put the tax percentage in one cell . Then whenever, I need to calculate the tax , I would link that specific cell to my calculation. As the tax rate changes, I only need to modify that cell and my all calculation would be fixed. Regardless, users can make mistake with hard coding and linking. In any situation, users must be aware and double check at their calculation to make sure it accurate.