Karl Broman and Kara Woo offer some good advice on organizing data in spreadsheets.
They advocate confining the use of spreadsheets to data entry and storage—moving calculations and visualizations to other tools. This certainly avoids some of the biggest problems with using spreadsheets.
However, spreadsheets don’t enforce any discipline. It’s up to the user to be vigilant and do the right thing. People are bad at maintaining consistency. Computers are excellent at it. Why make it hard for ourselves?
Spreadsheets. Just say no.
