Page 31 - Excel Workbook for Dummies

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14 Part I: Creating Spreadsheets
Moving to a different sheet in the workbook

Each new workbook you start uses the general Excel Worksheet template that auto-
matically includes three blank worksheets that you can fill with data. If you need more
space for a particular spreadsheet, you can add additional worksheets with the
Insert➪Worksheet command. If you want all new workbooks you open to have more
worksheets, enter a new value in Sheets in a New Workbook text box on the General
tab of the Options dialog box (Tools➪Options).

Each sheet in a workbook is automatically given the next available numeric name such
as Sheet1, Sheet2, and the like, but you can easily replace these generic names with
something descriptive: Double-click the tab you want to rename, type the new sheet
name, and press Enter. You can also color-code a sheet tab by right-clicking it, clicking
Tab Color on the shortcut menu, and then selecting the color Format Tab Color dialog
box before you select OK.
Of course, you must know how to move between the sheets in order to be able to add
and edit data in them. The most direct way to select a new worksheet is to click its
sheet tab, although you can also use the shortcut keys Ctrl+Page Down to select the
next sheet and Ctrl+Page Up to select the previous sheet.
If you add so many worksheets to your workbook that all their sheet tabs can’t all be
displayed at one time, you can use the Tab scroll buttons to the immediate left of the
sheet tab to bring into view the tabs you want to select. You can also display more
tabs by reducing the width of the horizontal bar (by dragging to the right the split bar
that appears when you position the mouse pointer on the vertical bar at the beginning
of the scroll bar).

Try It

Exercise 1-7: Moving to Different Worksheets
Practice moving the cell cursor to specific cells in different worksheets of Book1 by
doing the following:
1. Move the cell cursor to cell J25 on Sheet2 (whose cell reference is Sheet2!J25).

2. Move the cell cursor to cell CC1000 on Sheet3 (Sheet3!CC1000).
3. Move the cell cursor to cell Sheet 3:J25 on Sheet3, and then activate Sheet2 (note
the difference in the worksheet view despite the fact that you’ve moved to the
same cell on an earlier worksheet).

4. Rename Sheet1 to Spring Sale.

Selecting Cell Ranges

When entering, editing, or formatting a single cell, all you have to do is move the cell
cursor to it as you practiced in the earlier exercises. You can also enter the same data
as well do the same type of editing and formatting in a bunch of cells at one time, but
to do so, you must first select the cells where all this is going to happen.

Most of the time when selecting multiple cells in a worksheet, you select a discrete
block of cells of so many rows high and so many columns wide. Such a block is known
as a cell range in the parlance of spreadsheet software.