Page 40 - Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Programming Inside Out

Part 1: Preliminaries
Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Programming Inside Out

Tip Limit the number of worksheets to one
If you plan to create a lot of templates, which requires saving a workbook that contains a
single worksheet, you could save a few steps by changing the default number of work-
sheets to one until you are done creating templates.

You navigate among worksheets in a workbook using the controls on the tab bar at the bot­
tom left corner of the Excel window. Each worksheet has its own sheet tab (named Sheet1,
Sheet2, and Sheet3 by default); clicking a sheet tab displays the corresponding sheet, while
right-clicking a sheet tab displays a shortcut menu with commands to insert a new sheet,
rename or delete the selected sheet, move or copy sheets, or change the color of the sheet tab
of the selected sheet. The ability to change the color of a sheet tab was introduced in Excel
2002 and is a handy technique you can use to indicate where you made changes in a work-
Chapter 2
book, emphasize one sheet over another (such as if you create a summary worksheet), and
facilitate workbook navigation.

Important One little-known limitation in Excel is that you may use up to only 56 colors in
a workbook. The limitation doesn’t include the colors depicted in graphics you embed or
link to in a workbook, so if you need to display a complex chart with more than 56 colors
you will need to create the chart, export the chart and its legend to a graphics program, edit
the chart and legend, and either display the chart and legend as a separate graphics file or
embed the new file in your workbook.

Worksheets

Of the four basic types of sheets you’ll work with in Excel, worksheets are by far the most com­
mon. Worksheets contain cells, which are arranged in rows and columns, where you store
data and create formulas to summarize that data. As noted in Table 2-1, Excel worksheets
have a maximum of 256 columns and 65,536 rows. If you’re working with larger data sets,
such as those generated by scientific experiments or a transaction tracking system in a busy
sales organization, you should probably write the data to a text file and either process it in man­
ageable chunks or use a more powerful, enterprise-worthy application to analyze the data.

Table 2-1. Excel Worksheets Can Hold a Lot of Data but Have Their Limits
Attribute Limit
Maximum rows 65,536
Maximum columns 256
Column width 255 characters
Row height 409 points
Maximum number of page breaks 1000

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