Mastering Worksheets in Excel 2007
February 10, 2010 by Bethany Wilson
Filed under Online Trainings
Excel offers a number of different ways of inserting new sheets into your workbooks. One of the simplest is to use the Insert Worksheet button. This is located on the right-hand side of the worksheet tabs. Regardless of which worksheet is active, clicking this button will always insert a worksheet as the last tab in your workbook.
Excel also allows you to insert a worksheet at a given position within the workbook. For example, let’s say that we have a workbook containing all of the invoices issued by our company for each month of the year. There would be twelve worksheets named “January”, “February”, and so forth. Suppose we now want to insert quarterly analysis sheets at the end of each quarter.
As with columns, Excel will always insert new worksheets to the left of the currently selected tab. Therefore in order to insert the first quarterly analysis sheet, we need to select April. However, as we have already seen, we can’t use the Insert Worksheet button to insert the new sheet or it will always go at the end. So, instead of this, we use the Insert command in the Cells section of the Home Tab of the Excel Ribbon.
Another way of doing the same thing is to right-click on the “April” tab and choose Insert. Excel then asks us to specify the type of sheet we want to insert. We can insert a worksheet, we can insert a chart sheet, a backwardly compatible macro sheet or dialog sheet. The backwardly compatible options persist because they are sometimes useful for Excel developers. In addition to these presets, we can insert one of Excel’s pre-created spreadsheet solutions such as the billing statement or sales report. To add a worksheet, in the General tab of the Insert dialogue, highlight the worksheet button then click OK.
We would then rename the sheet; let’s say “Qtr1 Analysis” and repeat the same procedure to insert analysis sheets to the left of the “July” and “October” tabs. The analysis sheet of the fourth quarter will be the last sheet in the workbook. We can only insert a worksheet in this position by using the Insert Worksheet button.
You can delete the selected worksheet by using the Delete Sheets command in the Cells group of the Home Tab of the Excel Ribbon. It’s also possible to delete a sheet by right-clicking on the sheet tab and choosing Delete. To delete multiple sheets, simply highlight the relevant tabs and then using the Delete Sheet command.
Selecting multiple sheets requires the use of the classic Windows techniques of Shift-click and Control-click. To select a contiguous range of sheet tabs, click on the first then, while holding down the Shift key, click on the last. To select a non-contiguous range of tabs, click on the first then, while holding down the Control key, click on each of the others.
To deselect a selected range of tabs, click on a tab which isn’t selected. If all tabs are selected, just click on the name of any tab to select only that tab.
Author is a developer and trainer with OnSiteTrainingCourses.Com, a UK IT training company offering Microsoft Excel Classes in London and throughout the UK.