When you're building formulas in Excel it's best practice to always put the assumption first, and this is particularly important when you're building cross sheet formulas that reference cells on other sheets. If you do this, when you do control left square bracket, it will take you to the first cell that's been referenced by the formula, which in our case, because we've put the assumption first, would be the assumption. We can then jump back to the original formula using F5 and enter, and that brings us back to the formula, to the original location.

In this first example, we're going to put the assumption first. Now the assumptions of this case are on a different sheet. So I'm going to go equals one plus, my revenue growth assumption, which is 5%, times the previous year's revenue number. So, that's given me 110.3 in year one, and in the second example, what I'm going to do is I'm going to link to the revenue number first then multiply by one plus the assumption.

Okay? So unsurprisingly, we're getting exactly the same number for both of these calculations, okay, and I can show you what the formulas are using, the formula text function here, I'll just put that in. Okay, so you can sort of see the first formula is quite a bit longer than the second one, and that's because it's actually had to reference the other sheet twice. Whereas in the second example, it's only had to do it once, 'cause we linked directly to a cell on the original sheet. Now, so you might think that second method is actually better. It isn't, 'cause when it comes to summery checking to make sure we've built our formulas correctly, what I'm able to do in the first example is press control left square bracket, which takes me over to the other sheet, and shows me that I've got the correct assumption. I can then move back by pressing F5 and enter. In the second example, however, if I do control left square bracket, it only takes me to the historical revenue number. I have no way of quickly getting over to the other sheet to check. Another really useful shortcut is the F5 button. F5 is the go-to shortcut, and if we press alt and S, once we've pressed F5, that opens up the go-to special menu, and when we're in this menu, what we're able to do is identify lots of cells that have got the same characteristics. So for instance, we could easily identify all the hard-coded values in a sheet, just at the click of a button. Let's test out the F5 shortcut, and what I'm going to do is put some dummy data into our spreadsheets from before. So, we'll start off with sales, we've got some costs as well, and we will have a profit line also. Right, and then in the latest historical year, I'm gonna type in some numbers. So, I've got 2000 for my sales, I've got 1200 for my costs, and I can now calculate the profit by simply taking sales less cost, and this is typically what you would do if you were building a model from scratch. Okay, now what I wanna be able to do though is easily identify the hard-coded numbers. If you remember earlier on we had blue numbers, representing the historicals, if you like, okay, and you can tell in the formula bar that these are just hard-coded numbers. Whereas in the projected year, we've got formulas, and you can, again, you look in the formula bar, you can see the formulas there, which is fine, but we don't wanna have to look at every single cell when we open, when we look at a spreadsheet, wanna be able to identify straightaway which numbers are hard-coded, i.e historical, and which numbers have been calculated. So, what we're going to do then is use the F5 shortcut to help us with this. If I press F5, alt S for special, O for formulas, and then X so that I'm deselecting the text, I can then press enter for okay, and you'll see that it's highlighted all of the hard-coded numbers only on the sheet. So, all I have to do now is apply the style that I want. So, the shortcut to get to the styles menu is alt HJ, and then selecting the blue style and press enter, and that's a very quick way of identifying the hard-coded numbers, and then applying a style to them so that they're easy recognizable to any users of the model.