An interview with Kári S Friðriksson was featured in Morgunblaðið, one of the leading newspaper in Iceland, and a discussion about his recent article on the importance of well structured data.
The article was mostly focused on the concept of tidy data, which was introduced in Hadley Wickham's paper. This concept has been gaining popularity, especially within the R community and among data scientists. Although the term is recent, it is closely related to the way formal databases (SQL) are usually structured. More and more R packages are based on this concept, which greatly echanges the users ability to use multiple packages throughout the entire workflow in a coherent way.
But these concepts are no less valuable for Excel users. Excel data structured in this way makes most operations (add columns, calculating, summarizing, filtering, combining data tables, making graphs, etc.) a lot easier. It also allows the use of pivot tables almost without effort. Furthermore, tidy data makes it usually a great deal easier to use and understand excel documents from other users.