Writing Advice Wednesday: Write in Excel

Productivity hack? One weird trick? The secret to…? Call it what you want, but I’ve recently adopted a technique to my freelance writing that has been incredibly helpful:

I’ve started writing many of my freelance projects in Excel.

Yes, a spreadsheet. And it’s been a game-changer, because it’s increased organization, surfaced better flow, and makes projects less daunting. Let me tell you a story.

Five Good Sentences

Everyone in my master’s program had to take a class called Humanities 101, which was a deep-discussion seminar on a particular topic — mine was Reconstruction literature — and that also served as a prep for writing our thesis.

We read excerpts from a book on style that not only discussed how to properly structure an essay (which I had been doing for years — five paragraphs, y’all), but how to construct essays at the paragraph and sentence level.

Each paragraph should consist of five sentences: The first introduces the paragraph, the second sets up the concept, the third is the example, the fourth restates the concept, and the fifth anticipates the next paragraph. And you could write an entire thesis with that structure, sentence by sentence.

At the time, we were all like, “This is sooooo in the weeds hahaha!!” But looking back, that was some of the best writing advice ever.

How Do I Love Thee? Let Me =COUNT the Ways

I was the Excel master at my last job.

I did a lot of data tracking for large numbers of students, and not only needed Excel skill, but needed it at scale. I remember this 26 column, 1000 row spreadsheet I kept for a three day event, which I eventually merged into individually emailed schedules for the 1000 attendees with NOT ONE MISTAKE. And let me tell you about this other Excel I kept that tracked course scores. I set it up so that multiple sheets of raw data would feed back into the master sheet via =VLOOKUP, and there were formulas to show whether scores were above or below a certain criteria, and I had coloring conditions set up on it, and it was a thing of BEAUTY.

It was then when I got into the habit of going to Excel to make outlines, or planning docs, or itineraries. There’s just something about the layout that allows you to be so organized.

Setting the Course

A few months ago I was asked to write the script for a course. I’ve always been a Word doc gal, and I’m not sure how I landed on Excel — I either did an outline in Excel or because the script template was a two-column table, I thought I’d use Excel to mirror it — but I opened up an Excel and did a quick outline of the big sections in Column A.

Then I realized that I could chunk the sections down into my major points in Column B, and began jotting notes: intro, lead-in, example A, example B, conclusion…

Wait. That’s like the academic essay layout from before!

I kept going. Each point in Column B was one cell, and would only be a few sentences long. So I just wrote the sentences there. Instead of trying to fill an entire Word doc, or be overwhelmed with a blank page, I was just writing one cell. I can write a few sentences in one cell!

In Column C, I can fill in my citations that corresponded with the Column B content, to keep track. I can add new “paragraphs” by just inserting cells. All the while I’m still following my outline in Column A.

Because I was writing a series of related courses, there was no need for multiple Word docs to keep track of. I just added more sheets to one Excel file. What a great system of organization!

Trying It Out for Other Writing

While using Excel as my go-to document for writing courses has been an excellent approach, how would it work for other things like articles?

In just the past few days I’ve started drafting articles in Excel, with a similar approach: Column A has my outline, Column B has my notes on each paragraph, which I then just write out in the cell. On a much longer, more academic article I’m writing, I’m actually taking the academic approach to structuring at the sentence level, by assigning one cell per sentence to make sure I have the right organization.

Give this a try on your next project and see if it helps you keep better organized, and better structured!