As I look through the tips posted on OzGrid and elsewhere, most seem geared toward helping folks construct effective workbooks, develop charts, or write VBA code, etc. I don't see much directly geared toward helping to decipher what someone else has done to create a complicated spreadsheet that you've inherited (or with helping you figure out how you did something in a sheet you haven't looked at for months or longer).
My thought is that perhaps we could create a thread with the various things we do to simplify this process for ourselves, and then we could reference folks to this thread (or a summary of it if someone creates it) as a general reference.
I'll volunteer my favorite tool: the Auditing Toolbar. I don't see this discussed very often, and wonder if it's because MicroSoft doesn't make it as easy to find as most of the other standard toolbars. To load it I have to VIEW > TOOLBARS > CUSTOMIZE > AUDITING
The result (which hopefully saved as the leftmost icons on the second row of the toolbar) is a set of icons that automatically draw arrows indicating either (first icon) which cells feed into
the cell selected, or (third icon) which cells the selected cell feeds into.
In the example, select cell D5 and click the left auditing icon. It will out a dot in and draw arrows from cells A1, A4, adn A7. Do this in cell D2 and it will draw a box around the range A1:B2 and put a dot in the top left cell of the range. Click the eraser icon and the arrows will disappear. (Saving will also make them disappear.) If you print with the arrows visible, they print, too.
Select cell A1 and click the third icon and it will draw arrows from A1 to cells D2 and D5, because they reference A1 directly.
Clicking the first icon while having selected cell D13 (which references cells in other sheets) will draw incoming arrows from cell D11 and from a "Sheet" icon. To see the references from the other sheets, double click the arrow from the "Sheet" icon. It will bring up a dialog box of the links. Select a link in the dialog box and its refences will display in the Reference box.
What favorite methods do you all use?