Organization

This post would make my wife proud, because it's about organization!
As I said before, I use Excel to track my collection so I know what I have and what I need to get to complete sets. I've been trying to think of how to better utilize all that Excel offers. In grad school, I used Excel a ton and I know that it is a pretty powerful program, I've just been using it inefficiently. Does anyone out there use Excel for your collection? How do you keep things organized? I have a basic spreadsheet with tabs for eat set that feeds a main page where I keep a running total of everything. This works, but as I said it's not very efficient and certainly not very elegant. Anyone have any tips? I know there are programs out there for doing this, but I like to create these things on my own.