Understanding Worksheet Tabs In Excel
Microsoft Excel is often referred to as a spreadsheet program but in fact an Excel 2007 document is container referred to as a workbook. Workbooks in turn contain worksheets & it the worksheet which actually stores your information. Although the number of worksheets is technically limited only by available memory for most computer users there will be a practical limit of a few dozen. A workbook containing hundreds of sheets will operate extremely slowly.
The controls for navigating & manipulating worksheets are located in the bottom left of the Microsoft Excel document window. Each worksheet has a named tab which identifies & is used to activate it. As well as worksheets Excel allows the user to create chart and other sheets. Each of these will also have a tab of its own.
When you insert a new sheet into a workbook excel automatically assigns is name consisting of the word “Sheet” followed by a number. The simplest way of changing this default name is to double-click on the worksheet tab & either edit the name or simply type a new one. You can also right-click on a sheet tab & choose rename. The Rename command is also found in the Format section of the Cells group of the Home Tab.
In the case of names which are rather long or in some way difficult it also possible to copy & paste text. You can use Control-C to copy a piece of text double click on a sheet tab & use Control-V to paste the text.
Another way of making tabs easily identifiable is to assign them colours. For example if we have worksheets containing monthly sales figures interspersed with sheets containing quarterly analysis we might assign a different colour for each quarter.
We would start by selecting the quarter one sheet then holding down the Control key we would click on the tabs containing the figures for January February & March. To set the colour of the selected tabs we can then choose Format Colour in the Format section of the Cells group of the Home Tab. We can then do the same to the sheets in the other three quarters.
As more & more sheets are added to a workbook the fact of having different colours for certain sheets offers us another way of identifying & finding both individual sheets & sheets of a certain type. Assigning colours to sheet tabs also allows users to conform to standards which may already exist within their organizations whereby a given colour is used to represent a certain type of document.
The author is trainer & developer with OnsiteTrainingCourses.Com an independent computer training company offering Excel Training Courses in London & on-site throughout the UK.
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