General troubleshooting tips for Excel formulas and VBA

Question

I'm interested mainly in Excel and VBA, reading a lot of questions in these topics.

I often find questions like "formula doesn't work", "what is the problem with this code" for which there are a couple of things the asker should check, and these are generally asked in comments quite quickly (have you double checked that your output is really wrong? Have you tracked your formula, if yes where it fails? Which line of code gives the error message and what it is? Have you checked the values of the relevant variables in the immediate window? Not the same, but similar comment: Please make some effort to solve your problem, we aren't a few code writing service...).
Sometimes understanding the question takes more effort than actually solving it.

The Stack Exchange site has many canned messages; e.g., the reasons for flags, and the options in the review queues. It would be useful to have a similar boilerplate response to which we could refer for questions that exhibit the most common problems, instead of typing the same suggestions and clarifying questions each time.

How does Stack Exchange (or Super User in particular) handle such "corporate knowledge" (standard responses to common issues)? How can I contribute to such an article? I don't feel myself enough experienced to do it alone.

Answer 1

One mechanism that is commonly used is the obvious one — answers to other questions.  Sometimes somebody will ask a question that strikes to the heart of an issue and draws large numbers of high-quality answers (and comments).  Other times a seasoned veteran of the site will ask a generic question simply for the purpose of having a place to hang answers on.  These are commonly tagged community-faq (or community-faq-proposed) in Super User.  (Similar questions on Unix & Linux are called “canonical questions”.  High-profile examples include:

• How do I add VBA in MS Office?
• How can I remove malicious spyware, malware, viruses or rootkits from my PC?
• What can I do if I forgot my Windows 7 password?
• How do I recover or “undelete” files that I accidentally deleted?
• What are PATH and other environment variables, and how can I set or use them?
• What are the shell's control and redirection operators? (on Unix & Linux)
• How to debug a bash script? (on Unix & Linux)

How do I recommend software in my answers? (tagged faq on Meta Super User) is, similarly, referenced in many comments.

If you’re feeling ambitious, write a broad question along the lines of the above and immediately post a similarly all-encompassing answer.

Answer 2

My immediate thought is that this sort of information would be useful to include in the tag wiki for microsoft-excel. In its current state, the tag wiki doesn't include any information that's particularly useful to people asking questions on the site. Maybe this is a good jumping-off point for reconstructing the Excel tag wiki.

While new users are unlikely to read the tag wiki before asking, this will at least give reviewers the ability to point to a link rather than repeating the same troubleshooting/asking advice on every poor question.