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314 Part VIII: The Part of Tens
as you work). This memory savings is important in really large workbooks as it enables
you to add more data to the spreadsheet as well as keep Excel from completely bogging
down when you open a spreadsheet for editing or printing.

Controlling the Display of Data

in Tables through Outlines

Many of the spreadsheets you create and maintain in Excel require more columns and
rows than can possibly fit on a single screen (even with a really large monitor) unless
you select a zoom magnification percentage so small that it’s impossible to read its
data. In some spreadsheets, such as Regional Income and CG Media Sales tables that
you worked with in several different exercises, you can easily reclaim some of this
screen estate as well as maintain a great degree of flexibility in how much of the data
to display by outlining the tables.

When you outline a typical data table (Data➪Group and Outline➪Auto Outline), Excel
adds outline buttons to both the rows and columns of the table (that appear in the
worksheet’s row and column headers). You can then use these outline buttons to con-
trol how much of table data is displayed on the screen (accomplished by hiding and
unhiding particular rows and columns of the table).
Outlines are perfect for tables such as the Regional Income and CG Media Sales tables,
where the monthly income and sales data are naturally summarized by quarterly and
annual totals for the various regions and products being tracked. With the help of the
level outline buttons, you can quickly collapse the table down the grand totals or quar-
terly totals and then just as easily completely expand all the monthly income and sales
data as well.

Outlining data tables like these makes it a snap to print and chart just a selected part
of their data. For example, to create a chart using only the quarterly totals in the
regional income table, all you have to do is use the level outline buttons to display
only columns with totals in the data table and then select the quarterly data prior to
clicking the Chart Wizard button on the Standard toolbar.

Use Compare Side by Side to

Work with Two Workbooks

To be a true Excel pro, you need to be comfortable working not only with the spread-
sheet data on different sheets of the same workbook but on sheets of different work-
books as well. One way in which Excel facilitates this is through the program’s ability to
open side-by-side windows on two different workbooks that you have open at a time.

When you’re only dealing with two open workbooks (which is most often the case as
any more than two open at a time are pretty hard to keep track of), you can create ver-
tical windows (one on top of the other), each displaying a part of a different workbook
simply by selecting the Excel Window➪Compare Side by Side With menu command.

What makes this window command so great is that as soon as you choose it, Excel
automatically opens a floating Compare Side by Side toolbar containing a Close Side by