IN THIS CHAPTER
This chapter covers some basic information regarding workbooks, worksheets, and windows. You'll discover tips and techniques to help you take control of your worksheets and help you work more efficiently.
In Excel, each file is called a workbook, and each workbook can contain one or more worksheets. You may find it helpful to think of an Excel workbook as a notebook and worksheets as pages in the notebook. As with a notebook, you can view a particular sheet, add new sheets, remove sheets, rearrange sheets, and copy sheets.
The following sections describe the operations that you can perform with worksheets.
Each Excel workbook file that you open is displayed in a window. A workbook can hold any number of sheets, and these sheets can be either worksheets (sheets consisting of rows and columns) or chart sheets (sheets that hold a single chart). A worksheet is what people usually think of when they think of a spreadsheet. You can open as many Excel workbooks as necessary at the same time.
Each Excel window has four buttons (which appear as icons) at the right side of its title bar. From left to right, they are Ribbon Display Options, Minimize, Maximize (or Restore Down), and Close.
An Excel window can be in one of the following states:
If you work with more than one workbook simultaneously (which is quite common), you need to know how to move, resize, and switch among the workbook windows.
To move or resize a window, make sure that it's not maximized. (Click the Restore Down button.) Then click and drag its title bar with your mouse.
To resize a window, click and drag any of its borders until it's the size that you want it to be. When you position the mouse pointer on a window's border, the mouse pointer changes to a double arrow, which lets you know that you can now click and drag to resize the window. To resize a window horizontally and vertically at the same time, click and drag any of its corners.
If you want all your workbook windows to be visible (that is, not obscured by another window), you can move and resize the windows manually, or you can let Excel do it for you. Choosing View Window Arrange All displays the Arrange Windows dialog box, shown in Figure 3.1. This dialog box has four window arrangement options. Just select the one that you want and click OK. Windows that are minimized aren't affected by this command.
At any given time, one (and only one) workbook window is the active window. The active window accepts your input and is the window on which your commands work. The active window appears at the top of the stack of windows. To work in a workbook in a different window, you need to make that window active. You can make a different window the active window in several ways:
You might be one of the many people who prefer to do most work with maximized workbook windows, which enables you to see more cells and eliminates the distraction of other workbook windows getting in the way. At times, however, viewing multiple windows is preferred. For example, displaying two windows is more efficient if you need to compare information in two workbooks or if you need to copy data from one workbook to another.
If you have multiple windows open, you may want to close those windows that you no longer need. Excel offers several ways to close the active window:
When you close a workbook window, Excel checks whether you have made any changes since the last time you saved the file. If you have made changes, Excel prompts you to save the file before it closes the window. If you haven't, the window closes without a prompt from Excel. Oddly, Excel provides no way to tell you if a workbook has been changed since it was last saved.
Sometimes you will be prompted to save a workbook even if you've made no changes to it. This occurs if your workbook contains any “volatile” functions. For example, if a cell contains =NOW()
, you will be prompted to save the workbook because the NOW
function updated the cell with the current date and time.
At any given time, one workbook is the active workbook, and one sheet is the active sheet in the active workbook. To activate a different sheet, just click its sheet tab, located at the bottom of the workbook window. You also can use the following shortcut keys to activate a different sheet:
If your workbook has many sheets, all its tabs may not be visible. Use the tab scrolling controls (see Figure 3.2) to scroll the sheet tabs. The sheet tabs share space with the worksheet's horizontal scrollbar. You also can drag the tab split control (to the left of the horizontal scrollbar) to display more or fewer tabs. Dragging the tab split control simultaneously changes the number of tabs and the size of the horizontal scrollbar.
Worksheets can be an excellent organizational tool. Instead of placing everything on a single worksheet, you can use additional worksheets in a workbook to separate various workbook elements logically. For example, if you have several products whose sales you track individually, you may want to assign each product to its own worksheet and then use another worksheet to consolidate your results.
Here are three ways to add a new worksheet to a workbook:
If you no longer need a worksheet or if you want to get rid of an empty worksheet in a workbook, you can delete it in either of two ways:
If the worksheet is not empty, Excel asks you to confirm that you want to delete the sheet (see Figure 3.3).
The default names that Excel uses for worksheets — Sheet1, Sheet2, and so on — are generic and nondescriptive. To make it easier to locate data in a multisheet workbook, you'll want to make the sheet names more descriptive.
To change a sheet's name, double-click the sheet tab. Excel highlights the name on the sheet tab so that you can edit the name or replace it with a new name.
Sheet names can contain as many as 31 characters, and spaces are allowed. However, you can't use the following characters in sheet names:
: | colon |
/ | slash |
backslash | |
[ ] | square brackets |
? | question mark |
* | asterisk |
Keep in mind that a longer worksheet name results in a wider tab, which takes up more space onscreen. Therefore, if you use lengthy sheet names, you won't be able to see as many sheet tabs without scrolling the tab list.
Excel allows you to change the background color of your worksheet tabs. For example, you may prefer to color-code the sheet tabs to make identifying the worksheet's contents easier.
To change the color of a sheet tab, right-click the tab and choose Tab Color from the shortcut menu. Then select the color from the color selector box. You can't change the text color, but Excel will choose a contrasting color to make the text visible. For example, if you make a sheet tab black, Excel will display white text.
If you change a sheet tab's color, the color is visible only when the sheet is not the active sheet.
You may want to rearrange the order of worksheets in a workbook. If you have a separate worksheet for each sales region, for example, arranging the worksheets in alphabetical order might be helpful. You can also move a worksheet from one workbook to another and create copies of worksheets, either in the same workbook or in a different workbook.
You can move or copy a worksheet in the following ways:
If you move or copy a worksheet to a workbook that already has a sheet with the same name, Excel changes the name to make it unique. For example, Sheet1 becomes Sheet1 (2). You probably want to rename the copied sheet to give it a more meaningful name. (See “Changing the name of a worksheet,” earlier in this chapter.)
In some situations, you may want to hide one or more worksheets. Hiding a sheet may be useful if you don't want others to see it or if you just want to get it out of the way. When a sheet is hidden, its sheet tab is also hidden. You can't hide all the sheets in a workbook; at least one sheet must remain visible.
To hide a worksheet, right-click its sheet tab and choose Hide Sheet. The active worksheet (or selected worksheets) will be hidden from view.
To unhide a hidden worksheet, right-click any sheet tab and choose Unhide Sheet. Excel opens the Unhide dialog box, which lists all hidden sheets. Choose the sheet that you want to redisplay, and click OK. For reasons known only to a Microsoft programmer who is probably retired by now, you can't select multiple sheets from this dialog box, so you need to repeat the command for each sheet that you want to unhide. When you unhide a sheet, it appears in its previous position among the sheet tabs.
As you add more information to a worksheet, you may find that navigating and locating what you want gets more difficult. Excel includes a few options that enable you to view your sheet, and sometimes multiple sheets, more efficiently. This section discusses a few additional worksheet options at your disposal.
Normally, everything you see onscreen is displayed at 100%. You can change the zoom percentage from 10% (very tiny) to 400% (huge). Using a small zoom percentage can help you get a bird's-eye view of your worksheet to see how it's laid out. Zooming in is useful if you have trouble deciphering tiny type. Zooming doesn't change the font size specified for the cells, so it has no effect on printed output.
You can change the zoom factor of the active worksheet window by using any of three methods:
Sometimes, you may want to view two different parts of a worksheet simultaneously — perhaps to make referencing a distant cell in a formula easier. Or you may want to examine more than one sheet in the same workbook simultaneously. You can accomplish either of these actions by opening a new view to the workbook, using one or more additional windows.
To create and display a new view of the active workbook, choose View Window New Window.
Excel displays a new window for the active workbook, similar to the one shown in Figure 3.5. In this case, each window shows a different worksheet in the workbook. Notice the text in the windows' title bars: climate data.xlsx:1
and climate data.xlsx:2
. To help you keep track of the windows, Excel appends a colon and a number to each window.
A single workbook can have as many views (that is, separate windows) as you want. Each window is independent. In other words, scrolling to a new location in one window doesn't cause scrolling in the other window(s). However, if you make changes to the worksheet shown in a particular window, those changes are also made in all views of that worksheet.
You can close these additional windows when you no longer need them. For example, clicking the Close button on the active window's title bar closes the active window but doesn't close the other windows for the workbook.
In some situations, you may want to compare two worksheets that are in different windows. The View Side by Side feature makes this task a bit easier.
First, make sure that the two sheets are displayed in separate windows. (The sheets can be in the same workbook or in different workbooks.) If you want to compare two sheets in the same workbook, choose View Window New Window to create a new window for the active workbook. Activate the first window; then choose View Window View Side by Side. If more than two windows are open, you see a dialog box that lets you select the window for the comparison. The two windows are tiled to fill the entire screen.
When using the Compare Side by Side feature, scrolling in one of the windows also scrolls the other window. If you don't want this simultaneous scrolling, choose View Window Synchronous Scrolling (which is a toggle). If you have rearranged or moved the windows, choose View Window Reset Window Position to restore the windows to the initial side-by-side arrangement. To turn off the side-by-side viewing, choose View Window View Side by Side again.
Keep in mind that this feature is for manual comparison only. Unfortunately, Excel doesn't provide a way to automatically identify the differences between two sheets.
If you prefer not to clutter your screen with additional windows, Excel provides another option for viewing multiple parts of the same worksheet. Choosing View Window Split splits the active worksheet into two or four separate panes. The split occurs at the location of the cell pointer. If the cell pointer is in row 1 or column A, this command results in a two-pane split; otherwise, it gives you four panes. You can use the mouse to drag the individual panes to resize them.
Figure 3.6 shows a worksheet split into two panes. Notice that row numbers aren't continuous. The top pane shows rows 13 through 23, and the bottom pane shows rows 247 through 256. In other words, splitting panes enables you to display in a single window widely separated areas of a worksheet. To remove the split panes, choose View Window Split again.
If you set up a worksheet with column headings or descriptive text in the first column, this identifying information won't be visible when you scroll down or to the right. Excel provides a handy solution to this problem: freezing panes. Freezing panes keeps the column or row headings visible while you're scrolling through the worksheet.
To freeze panes, start by moving the cell pointer to the cell below the row that you want to remain visible while you scroll vertically and to the right of the column that you want to remain visible while you scroll horizontally. Then choose View Window Freeze Panes and select the Freeze Panes option from the drop-down list. Excel inserts dark lines to indicate the frozen rows and columns. The frozen row and column remain visible while you scroll throughout the worksheet. To remove the frozen panes, choose View Window Freeze Panes, and select the Unfreeze Panes option from the drop-down list.
Figure 3.7 shows a worksheet with frozen panes. In this case, rows 1:4 and column A are frozen in place. (Cell B5 was the active cell when I used the View Window Freeze Panes command.) This technique allows you to scroll down and to the right to locate some information while keeping the column titles and the column A entries visible.
Most of the time, you'll want to freeze either the first row or the first column. The View Window Freeze Panes drop-down list has two additional options: Freeze Top Row and Freeze First Column. Using these commands eliminates the need to position the cell pointer before freezing panes.
In some situations, you may want to monitor the value in a particular cell as you work. As you scroll throughout the worksheet, that cell may disappear from view. A feature known as Watch Window can help. A Watch Window displays the value of any number of cells in a handy window that's always visible.
To display the Watch Window, choose Formulas Formula Auditing Watch Window. The Watch Window is actually a task pane, and you can dock it to the side of the window or drag it and make it float over the worksheet.
To add a cell to watch, click Add Watch and specify the cell that you want to watch. The Watch Window displays the value in that cell. You can add any number of cells to the Watch Window. Figure 3.9 shows the Watch Window monitoring four cells in different worksheets.
This section discusses worksheet operations that involve complete rows and columns (rather than individual cells). Every worksheet has exactly 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns, and these values can't be changed.
Although the number of rows and columns in a worksheet is fixed, you can still insert and delete rows and columns if you need to make room for additional information. These operations don't change the number of rows or columns. Instead, inserting a new row moves down the other rows to accommodate the new row. The last row is simply removed from the worksheet if it's empty. Inserting a new column shifts the columns to the right, and the last column is removed if it's empty.
To insert a new row or rows, use either of these methods:
To insert a new column or columns, use either of these methods:
You can also insert cells rather than just rows or columns. Select the range into which you want to add new cells and then choose Home Cells Insert Insert Cells (or right-click the selection and choose Insert). To insert cells, you must shift the existing cells to the right or down. Therefore, Excel displays the Insert dialog box shown in Figure 3.11 so that you can specify the direction in which you want to shift the cells. Notice that this dialog box also enables you to insert entire rows or columns.
You may also want to delete rows or columns in a worksheet. For example, your sheet may contain old data that is no longer needed, or you may want to remove empty rows or columns.
To delete a row or rows, use either of these methods:
Deleting columns works in a similar way.
If you discover that you accidentally deleted a row or column, select Undo from the Quick Access toolbar (or press Ctrl+Z) to undo the action.
Often, you'll want to change the width of a column or the height of a row. For example, you can make columns narrower to show more information on a printed page. Or you may want to increase row height to create a “double-spaced” effect.
Excel provides several ways to change the widths of columns and the height of rows.
Column width is measured in terms of the number of characters of a monospaced font that will fit into the cell's width. By default, each column's width is 8.43 units, which equates to 64 pixels (px).
Before you change the column width, you can select multiple columns so that the width will be the same for all selected columns. To select multiple columns, either click and drag in the column border or press Ctrl while you select individual columns. To select all columns, click the button where the row and column headers intersect. You can change columns widths by using any of the following techniques:
Row height is measured in points (a standard unit of measurement in the printing trade — 72 pt is equal to 1 inch). The default row height using the default font is 15 pt, or 20 px.
The default row height can vary, depending on the font defined in the Normal style. In addition, Excel automatically adjusts row heights to accommodate the tallest font in the row. So, if you change the font size of a cell to 20 pt, for example, Excel makes the row taller so that the entire text is visible.
You can set the row height manually, however, by using any of the following techniques. As with columns, you can select multiple rows:
Changing the row height is useful for spacing out rows and is almost always preferable to inserting empty rows between lines of data.
In some cases, you may want to hide particular rows or columns. Hiding rows and columns may be useful if you don't want users to see particular information or if you need to print a report that summarizes the information in the worksheet without showing all the details.
To hide rows in your worksheet, select the row or rows that you want to hide by clicking in the row header on the left. Then right-click and choose Hide from the shortcut menu. Or you can use the commands on the Home Cells Format Hide & Unhide drop-down list.
To hide columns, use the same technique, but start by selecting columns rather than rows.
A hidden row is actually a row with its height set to zero. Similarly, a hidden column has a column width of zero. When you use the navigation keys to move the cell pointer, cells in hidden rows or columns are skipped. In other words, you can't use the navigation keys to move to a cell in a hidden row or column.
Notice, however, that Excel displays a narrow column heading for hidden columns and a narrow row heading for hidden rows. You can click and drag the column heading to make the column wider — and make it visible again. For a hidden row, click and drag the small row heading to make the column visible.
Another way to unhide a row or column is to choose Home Find & Select Go To (or its F5 equivalent) to select a cell in a hidden row or column. For example, if column A is hidden, you can press F5 and specify cell A1 (or any other cell in column A) to move the cell pointer to the hidden column. Then you can choose Home Cells Format Hide & Unhide Unhide Columns.