RheingoldRiver’s How to Theorycraft Effectively provides excellent guidance for analysts and theorists, with well-put general advice supported by specific suggestions for effectively gaining insight using a spreadsheet tool. I strongly recommend reading her post in full, as she goes into the specifics of constructing an effective question and the spreadsheet targeted at answering it. At the highest level, the steps she goes into are:
- Choose a good question
- Decide what stats you need to answer the question
- Figure out what intermediate values you need, and calculate them
- Make your formulas universal enough that you can autofill EVERYTHING!
- Decide how you want to present the final data, and fill in that formula
- Make sure everything is correct
- Duplicate your chart with other starting values
- Make gameplay decisions based on your numbers