Moving Excel Worksheets Between Workbooks
February 10, 2010 by Bethany Wilson
Filed under Online Trainings
Excel permits you to change the order of worksheets within a workbook at any time. There are two ways of doing this, the first of which is simply to drag the tabs that represent each worksheet. As well dragging a single tab, it is also possible to highlight several tabs and drag them all at the same time.
Not only can we move worksheets around within the same workbook, it is also possible to move worksheets from one workbook to another. For example, suppose you have a workbook containing a worksheet for each month of the year (“Jan”, “Feb”, etc.) and that we now want to split this into four smaller workbooks, one for each quarter: the first containing “Jan”, “Feb” and “Mar”; the second containing “Apr”, “May” and “Jun”; and so forth.
To keep the number of sheets in each workbook to a minimum, we could begin by changing the default number of worksheets Excel will give us in each new workbook. This is done by clicking on the Office Button and choosing Excel Options. In the section headed “When creating new workbooks Include This Many Sheets”, we alter the number to one. We can then generate our four worksheets by clicking four times on the new sheet icon on the Quick Access Toolbar.
Each of the new workbooks will have one sheet, which is the minimum that Excel will allow. We can access the new workbooks by clicking on the View Tab of the Ribbon and using the Switch Windows drop-down menu. To move worksheets between workbooks using drag and drop, we will need to see all the workbooks simultaneously. Excel has a special command for achieving this. In the View Tab, we click on the Arrange All button and choose “Tiled”. Excel will then display each of the workbooks in a smaller window, allowing us to see all of the open workbooks simultaneously.
The next step is to highlight the three worksheets relating to the first quarter: we click on “Jan” (the first), hold down the Shift key and click on “Mar” (the last). We can then drag the selected sheets across to the window of one of our new workbooks. We can the simply repeat this procedure for the three remaining quarters.
As we saw earlier, the minimum number of sheets which you can have in a workbook is one. Therefore, when we have moved the last three sheets from the original workbook, the window will simply disappear. Naturally, however, the last saved version of the file will still exist.
The final step would be to delete the unwanted sheet from each of the four new workbooks. Having done this, to leave the split screen view and return to normal mode, we simply maximise any of the windows.
Just for reference, the second way of copying sheets from one workbook to another is to use the Move or Copy Sheets command. This can be found in the Format drop-down menu in the Cells section of the Home Tab or by right-clicking on the selected sheet tabs. As well as moving sheets, this method also allows you to create a copy at another location.
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