Visualizations

Quickly identify formula errors and inconsistencies across many cells simultaneously, eliminating the need for tedious, individual cell checks.

Formula Flow helps you visualize the formula structure of your spreadsheets, quickly highlighting errors and inconsistencies. As you change cell contents, the visualization updates automatically.

Visualization Rules

Horizontal line patterns indicate consistent formulas across columns in a contiguous range, while vertical line patterns show consistent formulas down rows in a contiguous range. Crosshatched patterns signify consistent formulas both horizontally and vertically in a contiguous range. Darker turquoise shading highlights formulaic inconsistencies within the inspected range, often accompanied by Excel's green "inconsistent formula" indicators.

Changes made to your spreadsheet by Formula Flow cannot be undone, except as indicated below, and will clear Excel's Undo stack, so consider saving your work before using Formula Flow.

Dependency Density allows you to visualize the link density in your spreadsheet by shading cells orange based on the relative number of dependents each cell has. The darker the shading, the more dependents a cell has.

Usage in Financial Modeling

In financial models, horizontally adjacent cells typically have the same number of dependents, leading to consistent shading. Therefore, you would expect Dependency Density to produce consistent orange shading intensity within a row of cells. Horizontal line patterns indicate consistent formulas across columns in a contiguous range, while vertical line patterns show consistent formulas down rows in a contiguous range. Crosshatched patterns signify consistent formulas both horizontally and vertically in a contiguous range. Darker turquoise shading highlights formulaic inconsistencies within the inspected range, often accompanied by Excel's green "inconsistent formula" indicators.

This tool helps you quickly identify areas with high dependency, ensuring better understanding and management of complex models.

Macabacus checks the entire "used range" on the worksheet for visualizations. If this range is very large, clearing visualizations may take time and appear to freeze Excel.

To improve performance, use Macabacus' Clean Used Ranges tool, accessible fromFile > Optimize > Clean Used Ranges . If slowness persists, use native Excel functionality to remove visualizations, which are just cell fill patterns. Restrict the use of visualizations to worksheets with fewer used rows and columns to prevent performance issues.

_{This documentation refers to the latest Macabacus version. Some features and descriptions of these features may not apply to older versions of Macabacus. Update your Macabacus software to take advantage of the latest features.}