Microsoft Excel is often referred to as a spreadsheet program but, in fact, an Excel 2007 document is a container referred to as a workbook. Workbooks, in turn, contain worksheets and it is the worksheet which actually stores your information. Although the number of worksheets is technically limited only by available memory, for most computer users, there will be a practical limit of a few dozen. A workbook containing hundreds of sheets will operate extremely slowly.

The controls for navigating and manipulating worksheets are located in the bottom left of the Microsoft 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.

Microsoft Excel (Windows)
 

 

In the case of names which are rather long or in some way difficult, it is also possible to copy and paste text. You can use Control-C to copy a piece of text, double click on a sheet tab and use Control-V to paste the text.

Another way of making tabs easily identifiable is to assign them colours. For example, if we have worksheets containing monthly sales figures interspersed with sheets containing quarterly analysis, we might assign a different colour for each quarter.

We would start by selecting the quarter one sheet then, holding down the Control key, we would click on the tabs containing the figures for January, February and March. To set the colour of the selected tabs, we can then choose Format Colour in the Format section of the Cells group of the Home Tab. We can then do the same to the sheets in the other three quarters.

As more and more sheets are added to a workbook, the fact of having different colours for certain sheets offers us another way of identifying and finding both individual sheets and sheets of a certain type. Assigning colours to sheet tabs also allows users to conform to standards which may already exist within their organizations, whereby a given colour is used to represent a certain type of document.

The author is a trainer and developer with OnsiteTrainingCourses.Com, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007 Classes in London and on-site throughout the UK.

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Kyle Tyndall is the owner and operator of this Tech Blog. He writes and host other writers articles about technology here. He is a computer technician for the school district he lives in and has worked in technology since 2001.  Thanks for stopping by.

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