The COIN Tool is easier to use on a larger screen. It makes use of freezing some rows and columns to show the data in context. However, on a laptop this may leave only a small corner of the window available for inspecting the data.

To help this, either:

• Hide rows and columns by selecting a (range of) column(s)/row(s), right clicking and selecting “Hide”. You can un-hide by selecting the range of rows/columns in which the hidden rows/columns are, right-clicking and selecting “Unhide”.

• Shrink rows/columns by simply dragging them and making them smaller.

The COIN Tool is built in Excel in order to be accessible to the widest range of users, and also aims to provide maximum flexibility in accommodating many different possible composite indicator structures and methodological approaches. This combination results in a large Excel file, which can be slow to work with due to its size and the way that Excel works.

To make the COIN Tool experience as user-friendly as possible, we recommend that you disable automatic workbook calculation. This is done as follows:

• Go to the “File” menu

• Go to Options -> Formulas -> Workbook calculation and set to MANUAL

This will make the COIN Tool much faster to use, but remember to manually re-calculate formulas when needed by pressing F9, or the "Calculate" button in the bottom left of the screen.

Go back to the Database tab. Check that you have entered a code for every level (sub-pillar, pillar, sub-index, index), for every indicator. Any deviations (e.g. “p.1” instead of “p.01”) will cause errors. See Section 3.1 and Box 1 for more details.

Also if you are copying in names from other spreadsheets, be extremely careful you are not copying in merged cells, as this may paste over hidden cells in the COIN Tool, and will cause the Framework tab to stop working.

This is probably due to an encoding error in the Database tab. Check that:

• Missing data is denoted as “n/a” (without the inverted commas), and nothing else

• Data is formatted as numbers and not text

Unit and indicator codes have not been altered from default values (“unit.xxx” and “ind.xxx”)

This is most likely due to an error in indicator definition - see previous point.

If the indicator tabs such as Winsorisation and IndCorrel work, but the tabs relating to aggregation (Rebalancing onwards) do not, this means you likely have an error in the specification of the indicator structure and/or weights. Check that:

• You have entered a code for every level (sub-pillar, pillar, sub-index, index), for every indicator. Any deviations (e.g. “p.1” instead of “p.01”) will cause errors. See Section 3.1 and Box 1 for more details.

• The weights have been specified for each indicator (Database tab) and aggregation level (Framework tab)

The direction has been specified for each indicator

The COIN Tool is “friendly-user” software: the user has to be friendly to the software, and careful to input values and parameters correctly, otherwise errors easily ensue.

If there are unfixable errors (after trying the solutions above), it is likely that you have either:

• Altered cells that are not meant to be altered (any cells not light blue or turquoise)

• Deleted or added the cells themselves rather than the contents

• Entered data or parameters in a way that does not follow the instructions of the manual (see previous points, and carefully re-read particularly the instructions in Section 3 ).

If you can’t find your error, it may be easier to start again with a clean version of the COIN Tool. If errors persistently occur, there may also be a bug - please contact jrc-coin@ec.europa.eu if you think this is the case.