Preparing Work-Order Spreadsheets for the Shop Floor: A Practical Checklist

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If you run a fabrication shop, machine shop, or panel shop, the work order is one of the most important documents on the shop floor. It connects planning with execution and tells people what to build, how to build it, and in what quantities. In many plants this information ultimately lives in Excel or another spreadsheet exported from an ERP/MRP system.

The problem: those exports are designed for systems and planners, not for the people actually cutting, bending, and welding parts. They often have dozens of columns, inconsistent text, and “internal” fields that just get in the way on the shop floor.

In this article we’ll walk through a practical checklist for turning a messy work-order spreadsheet into a clear, shop-ready document. We’ll also see where a helper tool like Work Order Checker can make these steps faster and more reliable.

If you haven’t read them yet, you may also find these articles useful:

Step 1 – Start with the shop floor in mind

Before you touch the spreadsheet, think about the people who will actually use the work order on the shop floor. Their needs are simple:

They must be able to tell at a glance which parts they are responsible for.
They need to see the correct revision, material, and thickness for each part.
They need the routing / operation sequence so they know which processes to run.
They need reliable quantities so they don’t over- or under-produce.

That usually translates into a small set of essential columns:

Part Number – often with prefixes that indicate the part family (for example SHF- for shelf panels, SUP- for support brackets).
Description – human-readable name, including basic dimensions.
Revision – to avoid building the wrong version.
Material / Thickness – either in their own columns or buried in the description.
Routing / Operation – sequence of processes the part must go through.
Quantity – how many units the shop needs to make.

Everything else (job metadata, customer codes, internal IDs, cost fields, etc.) is useful for planning and traceability, but often just noise for the people running the machines. We’ll keep those fields in the background and focus on what the shop actually needs.

Step 2 – Clean up the raw export

Most ERP/MRP exports and customer spreadsheets are technically “correct” but not friendly. A quick clean-up pass makes the rest of the process much easier.

2.1 Make the structure predictable

Ensure there is exactly one header row and that it uses consistent names (for example Part Number instead of a mix of Part, Item, and PN).
Remove blank rows in the middle of the data. They confuse filters and formulas.
Avoid merged cells in the data area. Keep every row independent.
Check that the file is really a table of rows and columns, not a mix of headers, subtotals, and notes.

2.2 Standardise key text fields

On the shop floor, humans can usually guess that “Shelf panel”, “Shelf-panel”, and “SHF panel” all mean the same thing. Spreadsheets are far less forgiving. Before you start filtering or building rules, try to reduce variation:

Pick a canonical spelling for each part family (for example “Shelf panel”, “Front panel”, “Rear rail”).
Fix obvious typos and spacing issues that would break simple text searches.
If your ERP adds extra descriptors you don’t use, consider moving them to a separate notes column.

You don’t have to make everything perfect. The goal is to make sure that a simple “column contains text” search will reliably pick up the parts you care about.

Step 3 – Build a reviewer checklist

Next, create a plain-language checklist of what you want to verify before the work order goes to the shop. This is the non-technical version of your review logic, and it should be understandable even to someone who never opens Excel.

A typical checklist for a sheet-metal or fabrication job might include:

Part families present – Do we see all expected families (shelf panels, front panels, rear rails, brackets, stiffeners, etc.)?
Quantities sane – Do quantities for each family look reasonable compared to the project scope?
Material and thickness correct – Is each family assigned the correct material grade and nominal thickness?
Revisions consistent – Are there any mixes of revision A/B/C for the same part that might indicate old data?
Routing complete – Are there any rows with missing or placeholder routing operations?
Special cases flagged – Are unusually long lead-time items or bought-out parts clearly marked?

This checklist is what you want to execute mechanically on every work order, regardless of who happens to be on shift. Once it’s written down, you can decide how much of it to implement directly in Excel and how much to offload to a helper tool.

Step 4 – Turn the checklist into filters or rules

Now map each item on your reviewer checklist to something the spreadsheet can actually check.

4.1 Example mappings

“All shelf panels present” → filter rows where Part Number contains SHF- or Description contains “Shelf panel” and confirm that the count matches expectations.
“All front panels present” → filter rows where Description contains “Front panel”.
“All 3 mm parts correct” → filter rows where Description contains “3.0 mm” or Part Number contains a 3.0T thickness code.
“No missing routing” → filter rows where the routing or operation column is blank or contains placeholders like “TBD”.

You can absolutely build these checks in pure Excel with built-in filters, helper columns, and functions like FILTER and SEARCH. For many teams, though, it’s easier to move this logic into a dedicated rule-based tool and leave Excel as the data source and final reporting format.

Work Order Checker is designed exactly for this situation. Instead of burying your logic in formulas, you:

choose the columns that matter (for example Part Number, Description, Material, Routing, Quantity),
add a list of strings you care about (such as SHF, SUP, “Shelf panel”, “Front panel”, “3.0 mm”),
turn those strings into rules like “Part Number contains SHF” or “Description contains Front panel”.

Each rule gets its own filtered grid, so you can inspect one part family at a time without constantly fiddling with filters.

Step 5 – Export a shop-ready workbook

Once you’ve run your checks and you’re confident the work order is complete, it’s time to prepare the version that will actually go to the shop floor. Here the priorities are simplicity and clarity.

A practical format is:

All Rows – a clean table of the original data, limited to the columns the shop actually uses.
One sheet per part family or rule – for example “Shelf panels”, “Front panels”, “Rear rails”, “Brackets”, “3.0 mm parts”.
Statistics – a summary table showing how many rows match each rule / family.

You can build this structure manually in Excel with filters and copy-paste. However, that’s yet another repetitive step that has to be done correctly every time.

Work Order Checker automates this formatting step: when you click Export, it writes a new Excel workbook containing an All Rows sheet, one sheet per search rule, and a statistics sheet, with numbers, dates, and percentages typed so that normal Excel sorting and formulas keep working. The original export stays untouched; the shop gets a tidy, read-only workbook that focuses on what they need.

Step 6 – Save your setup as a template for repeat jobs

Many shops receive work orders from the same customers again and again, often using exactly the same spreadsheet layout. Rebuilding your columns, strings, and rules from scratch each time is just wasted effort.

Once you are happy with your layout for a particular customer or ERP export:

Write down (or save) your reviewer checklist.
Save your spreadsheet layout – either as a master workbook in Excel or as a layout template in Work Order Checker.
Document any special rules (for example “ignore parts where Quantity = 0” or “these families always go to a specific cell”).

In Work Order Checker you can save the current combination of columns, strings, and rules as a named layout and load it the next time you receive a similar work order. Instead of a 30-minute spreadsheet wrestling session, the review becomes a quick “load → check → export” routine.

Bringing it all together

Preparing work-order spreadsheets for the shop floor doesn’t have to be a painful, ad-hoc chore. If you:

start with the shop floor’s needs and focus on the columns they actually use,
clean up the raw export so simple text-based rules work reliably,
turn your review logic into a clear checklist and matching filters or rules,
export a shop-ready workbook with family-specific sheets and statistics, and
save that setup as a reusable template for each customer or ERP format,

you end up with a stable, repeatable process that anyone on your team can run.

If you’d like a tool that supports this workflow out of the box, download Work Order Checker, point it at your latest work-order export, and try building your first layout and shop-ready workbook. Then use this checklist as a standard operating procedure for every job that follows.