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 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 way of making your worksheet tabs easily identifiable is to assign them colours. For example, say you have worksheets containing monthly sales figures interspersed with sheets containing quarterly analysis, you could assign a different colour to worksheets in each quarter.
We would start by highlighting the “Quarter 1″ sheet then, holding down the Control key, we would click on the “January”, “February” and “March” tabs. To set the colour of the highlighted tabs, we would then choose Format Colour in the Format section of the Cells group of the Home Tab. We would then repeat this procedure for 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 types of sheet offers us another way of identifying and finding information quickly. Assigning colours to sheet tabs can also allows Excel users to conform to standards which may already exist within their organisations, for example, where a given colour is used to represent worksheets containing data of a certain type.
The The writer of this article is a training consultant with Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007 Classes in London and throughout the UK.
February 5, 2010 by Angela Harrison-Dyer