Navigating, Copying And Moving Worksheets In Microsoft Excel 2007
Each Excel 2007 document is a container referred to as a workbook. Workbooks, in turn, are made up of worksheets and it is the worksheets that actually store your information. Although the number of worksheets which a workbook may contain is limited only by available memory, for most computer users, there will be a practical limit of a few dozen. If a workbook contained hundreds of sheets, it would operate extremely slowly.
The controls for navigating and manipulating worksheets are located in the bottom left of the Excel document window. Each worksheet has a named tab which identifies and is used to activate it. As well as worksheets, Excel allows the user to create chart (and other) sheets. Each of these will also have a tab of its own.
When you insert a new sheet into a workbook, Excel automatically assigns is a name consisting of the word "Sheet" followed by a number. The simplest way of changing this default name is to double-click on the worksheet tab and either edit the name or simply type a new one. You can also right-click on a sheet tab and choose rename. The Rename command is also found in the Format section of the Cells group of the Home Tab.
For worksheets with names which are rather long or in some way difficult, it is also possible to copy and paste text. Simply use Control-C to copy a piece of text, double-click on a sheet tab and then use Control-V to paste the text.
Another facility for making tabs easily identifiable is to assign them colours. Let's say, for example, that we have worksheets containing monthly sales figures interspersed with sheets containing quarterly analysis. Excel allows to assign a different colour to the sheets in each quarter.
You would start by selecting the quarter one sheet then, holding down the Control key, click on the tabs containing the figures for January, February and March. Next, to set the colour of the selected tabs, choose Format Colour in the Format section of the Cells group of the Home Tab. You could then do the same to the sheets in the other three quarters.
As more and more sheets are added to a given workbook, the fact of having different colours for certain sheets offers another way of identifying and finding sheets of a certain type. Assigning colours to sheet tabs can also allow you to conform to standards which may already exist within your organisation, whereby a given colour may be used to represent a certain type of data.
Author is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Solutions, a UK IT training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007 training courses at their central London training centre.
