The “Standard” Spreadsheet Format
The end user can format a spreadsheet any way they wish. For that reason, there are no official (or even unofficial) ways to format a spreadsheet. However, when considering a spreadsheet for the purpose of corporate data, there must be a “standard” spreadsheet format.
Spreadsheets that are most likely to form the basis of corporate data are those spreadsheets that are formal. Some amount of thought has gone into these more formalized spreadsheets. Really informal spreadsheets seldom make good candidates for corporate data—they may have no headings or even row identifiers. Whoever created the more formal spreadsheets did so under the assumption that it is more than one person was going to utilize the spreadsheet.
For these reasons, then, any spreadsheet that is a viable candidate for corporate data must be in some standard format. The ideal “standard” format of a spreadsheet is seen in Figure 3...