Any tips on or can you point to a website to look at for information on creating a very large spreadsheet?

Question

It's not a spreadsheet with multiple complex formulas. It's to track contracts, so it's all just text and dates. We already have many columns, but we need to add more. Right now it just contains information on who's signing the contracts, when they signed it, when we we sent it to them for signatures, etc.

However, we need to add more columns to capture more specific information on the contractors themselves, like their mailing address and contact information. However, we feel like just adding additional columns would make it large and inefficient for our purposes.

Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated!

This is in Excel, btw.

Answer 1

With Excel you have Worksheets.  A worksheet is an individual spreadsheet.  If you have more than one worksheet, it becomes a Workbook.  I suggest that you add additional sheets.  The first one might be names "Addresses", another perhaps "Contact".  To get the name of the contractors from you present spreadsheet, lets name Contracts, in the other sheets, simply write the formula to add the contents of the name cell of the Contracts sheet to a column(s) in the Addresses and Contact sheet.  Don't copy the names from Contracts to the other sheets, as you want to keep it where if changes are made to the Contract sheet it reflects the changes in the other two sheets.  

This way the Contract sheet remains as you have it and the additional sheets will store the data you desire that is not now in your spread sheet.  Each sheet will be rather small in regard to column count.  The VLOOKUP is also an interesting function that can do lots of things for you.  It will require that the data being look at be in sorted order.

Answer 2

Just insert the columns you need. You're unlikely to ever exceed the number of columns available.

If you have repetitive data (e.g. same contractor with same name, address and contact details in multiple rows) you might be better off using a database. There are plenty of examples available and many contract management tools which are open source / gnu public licence.