An Excel Scorecard is an Excel Workbook that is used for reporting (i.e., given to a client). The following sub-sections contain tips relating to the optimal way of working with Q to update Excel Scorecards.
Generic filters
Consider the situation where you need to construct two scorecards, one containing data on men and another for data on women. The obvious way to do this in Q is to create two filters and change these filters to update the data. However, when constructing a scorecard it is useful to have a single filter and update the data by modifying this filter. For example, a filter could be created called Gender and, when the expression used to define this filter is changed, all of the tables will automatically update.
Single sheet export with linked cells
By default, Q exports to Excel with a separate sheet for every table. However, if when exporting you click the Advanced button (which is shown a few dialog boxes through the exporting process) and select Export all table data to one sheet, which will cause all the tables to be exported to a single sheet. You then use Excel formulas to link all of your scorecard data back to this sheet, which means that all you need to do to update your scorecard is to re-export the data from Q and the copy and paste it into this single sheet (or, alternatively, use Q's features for automatically updating an Excel worksheet).
Where changes to a study change the number of rows or columns in tables some care needs to be taken with this approach.
A disadvantage of this approach is that you will lose any formatting from Q (e.g., color-coding of significance levels). This can be remedied using Visual Basic programming within Excel.
Edit things in Q, not Excel
Often there are small mistakes in Q labels and it is tempting to edit these directly in Excel. For example, the label for Coke may be Cooke. However, this often causes problems later, as the data often gets re-exported at a later stage, causing either the correct label to be over-written by the incorrect label again, or, much worse, the correct label to end up next to the wrong data entirely.