Excel sheets into one

If you receive information in multiple sheets or workbooks that you want to summarize, the Consolidate command can help you pull data together onto one sheet. For example, if you have a sheet of expense figures from each of your regional offices, you might use a consolidation to roll up these figures into a corporate expense sheet. That sheet might contain sales totals and averages, current inventory levels, and highest selling products for the whole enterprise.

To decide which type of consolidation to use, look at the sheets you are combining. If the sheets have data in inconsistent positions, even if their row and column labels are not identical, consolidate by position. If the sheets use the same row and column labels for their categories, even if the data is not in consistent positions, consolidate by category.

Combine by position

For consolidation by position to work, the range of data on each source sheet must be in list format, without blank rows or blank columns in the list.

1. Open each source sheet and make sure that your data is in the same position on each sheet.

2. In your destination sheet, click the upper-left cell of the area where you want the consolidated data to appear.

   Note: Make sure that you leave enough cells to the right and underneath for your consolidated data.

3. On the Data tab, in the Data Tools group, click Consolidate.

   

4. In the Function box, click the function that you want Excel to use to consolidate the data.

5. In each source sheet, select your data.

   The file path is entered in All references.

6. When you have added the data from each source sheet and workbook, click OK.

Combine by category

For consolidation by category to work, the range of data on each source sheet must be in list format, without blank rows or blank columns in the list. Also the categories must be consistently labeled. For example, if one column is labeled Avg. and another is labeled Average, the Consolidate command will not sum the two columns together.

1. Open each source sheet.

2. In your destination sheet, click the upper-left cell of the area where you want the consolidated data to appear.

   Note: Make sure that you leave enough cells to the right and underneath for your consolidated data.

3. On the Data tab, in the Data Tools group, click Consolidate.

   

4. In the Function box, click the function that you want Excel to use to consolidate the data.

5. To indicate where the labels are located in the source ranges, select the check boxes under Use labels in: either the Top row, the Left column, or both.

6. In each source sheet, select your data. Make sure to include either the top row or left column information that you previously selected.

   The file path is entered in All references.

7. When you have added the data from each source sheet and workbook, click OK.

   Note: Any labels that don’t match labels in the other source areas cause separate rows or columns in the consolidation.

Combine by position

For consolidation by position to work, the range of data on each source sheet must be in list format, without blank rows or blank columns in the list.

1. Open each source sheet and make sure that your data is in the same position on each sheet.

2. In your destination sheet, click the upper-left cell of the area where you want the consolidated data to appear.

   Note: Make sure that you leave enough cells to the right and underneath for your consolidated data.

3. On the Data tab, under Tools, click Consolidate.

   

4. In the Function box, click the function that you want Excel to use to consolidate the data.

5. In each source sheet, select your data, and then click Add.

   The file path is entered in All references.

6. When you have added the data from each source sheet and workbook, click OK.

Combine by category

For consolidation by category to work, the range of data on each source sheet must be in list format, without blank rows or blank columns in the list. Also the categories must be consistently labeled. For example, if one column is labeled Avg. and another is labeled Average, the Consolidate command will not sum the two columns together.

1. Open each source sheet.

2. In your destination sheet, click the upper-left cell of the area where you want the consolidated data to appear.

   Note: Make sure that you leave enough cells to the right and underneath for your consolidated data.

3. On the Data tab, under Tools, click Consolidate.

   

4. In the Function box, click the function that you want Excel to use to consolidate the data.

5. To indicate where the labels are located in the source ranges, select the check boxes under Use labels in: either the Top row, the Left column, or both.

6. In each source sheet, select your data. Make sure to include either the top row or left column information that you previously selected, and then click Add.

   The file path is entered in All references.

7. When you have added the data from each source sheet and workbook, click OK.

   Note: Any labels that don’t match labels in the other source areas cause separate rows or columns in the consolidation.

You have several Excel workbooks and you want to merge them into one file? This could be a troublesome and long process. But there are 6 different methods of how to merge existing workbooks and worksheets into one file. Depending on the size and number of workbooks, at least one of these methods should be helpful for you. Let’s take a look at them.

Summary

If you want to merge just a small amount of files, go with methods 1 or method 2 below. For anything else, please take a look at the methods 4 to 6: Either use a VBA macro, conveniently use an Excel-add-in or use PowerQuery (PowerQuery only possible if the sheets to merge have exactly the same structure).

Method 1: Copy the cell ranges

The obvious method: Select the source cell range, copy and paste them into your main workbook. The disadvantage: This method is very troublesome if you have to deal with several worksheets or cell ranges. On the other hand: For just a few ranges it’s probably the fastest way.

Method 2: Manually copy worksheets

The next method is to copy or move one or several Excel sheets manually to another file. Therefore, open both Excel workbooks: The file containing the worksheets which you want to merge (the source workbook) and the new one, which should comprise all the worksheets from the separate files.

1. Select the worksheets in your source workbooks which you want to copy. If there are several sheets within one file, hold the Ctrl key and click on each sheet tab. Alternatively, go to the first worksheet you want to copy, hold the Shift key  and click on the last worksheet. That way, all worksheets in between will be selected as well.
2. Once all worksheets are selected, right click on any of the selected worksheets.
3. Click on “Move or Copy”.
4. Select the target workbook.
5. Set the tick at “Create a copy”. That way, the original worksheets remain in the original workbook and a copy will be created.
6. Confirm with OK.

One small tip at this point: You can just drag and drop worksheets from one to another Excel file. Even better: If you press and hold the Ctrl-Key when you drag and drop the worksheets, you create copies.

Method 3: Use the INDIRECT formula

The next method comes with some disadvantages and is a little bit more complicated. It works, if your files are in a systematic file order and just want to import some certain values. You build your file and cell reference with the INDIRECT formula. That way, the original files remain and the INDIRECT formula only looks up the values within these files. If you delete the files, you’ll receive #REF! errors.

Let’s take a closer look at how to build the formula. The INDIRECT formula has only one argument: The link to another cell which can also be located within another workbook.

1. Copy the first source cell.
2. Paste it into your main file using paste special (Ctrl + Alt + v ). Instead of pasting it normally, click on “Link” in the bottom left corner of the Paste Special window. That way, you extract the complete path. In our case, we have the following link:
   =[160615_Examples.xlsm]Thousands!$C$4
3. Now we wrap the INDIRECT formula around this path. Furthermore, we separate it into file name, sheet name and cell reference. That way, we can later on just change one of these references, for instance for different versions of the same file. The complete formula looks like this (please also see the image above):
   =INDIRECT(“‘”&$A3&$B3&”‘!”&D$2&$C3)

Important – please note: This function only works if the source workbooks are open.

Method 4: Merge files with a simple VBA macro

You are not afraid of using a simple VBA macro? Then let’s insert a new VBA module:

1. Go to the Developer ribbon. If you can’t see the Developer ribbon, right click on any ribbon and then click on “Customize the Ribbon…”. On the right hand side, set the tick at “Developer”.
2. Click on Visual Basic on the left side of the Developer ribbon.
3. Right click on your workbook name and click on Insert –> Module.
4. Copy and paste the following code into the new VBA module. Position the cursor within the code and click start (the green triangle) on the top. That’s it!

Sub mergeFiles()
    'Merges all files in a folder to a main file.
    
    'Define variables:
    Dim numberOfFilesChosen, i As Integer
    Dim tempFileDialog As fileDialog
    Dim mainWorkbook, sourceWorkbook As Workbook
    Dim tempWorkSheet As Worksheet
    
    Set mainWorkbook = Application.ActiveWorkbook
    Set tempFileDialog = Application.fileDialog(msoFileDialogFilePicker)
    
    'Allow the user to select multiple workbooks
    tempFileDialog.AllowMultiSelect = True
    
    numberOfFilesChosen = tempFileDialog.Show
    
    'Loop through all selected workbooks
    For i = 1 To tempFileDialog.SelectedItems.Count
        
        'Open each workbook
        Workbooks.Open tempFileDialog.SelectedItems(i)
        
        Set sourceWorkbook = ActiveWorkbook
        
        'Copy each worksheet to the end of the main workbook
        For Each tempWorkSheet In sourceWorkbook.Worksheets
            tempWorkSheet.Copy after:=mainWorkbook.Sheets(mainWorkbook.Worksheets.Count)
        Next tempWorkSheet
        
        'Close the source workbook
        sourceWorkbook.Close
    Next i
    
End Sub

Method 5: Automatically merge workbooks

The fifth way is probably most convenient:

Click on “Merge Files” on the Professor Excel ribbon.

Now select all the files and worksheets you want to merge and start with “OK”.

This procedure works well also for many files at the same time and is self-explanatory. Even better: Besides XLSX files, you can also combine XLS, XLSB, XLSM, CSV, TXT and ODS files.

To do that you need a third party add-in, for example our popular “Professor Excel Tools” (click here to start the download).

Here is the whole process in detail:

Method 6: Use the Get & Transform tools (PowerQuery)

The current version of Excel 365 offers the “Get & Transform” tools to import data. These functions are very powerful and are supposed to replace the old “Text Import Wizard”. However, they have one useful feature: Import a complete folder of documents.

The requirements: The workbooks and worksheets you want to import have to be in the same format.

Please follow these steps for importing a complete folder of Excel files.

1. Create a folder with all the documents you want to import.
2. Usually it’s the fastest to just copy the folder path directly from the Windows Explorer. You still have the change to later-on select the folder, though.
3. Within Excel, go to the Data ribbon and click on “Get Data”, “From File” and then on “From Folder”.
4. Paste the previously copied path or select it via the “Browse” function. Continue with “OK”.
5. If all files are shown in the following window, either click on “Combine” (and then on “Combine & Load To”) or on “Edit”. If you click on “Edit”, you can still filter the list and only import a selection of the files in the list. Recommendation: Put only the necessary files into your import folder from the beginning so that you don’t have to navigate through the complex “Edit” process.
6. Next, Excel shows an example of the data based on the first file. If everything seems fine, click on OK. If your files have several sheets, just select the one you want to import, in this example “Sheet1”. Click on “OK”.
7. That’s it, Excel now imports the data and inserts a new column containing the file name.

For more information about the Get & Transform tools please refer to this article.

Next step: Merge multiple worksheets to one combined sheet

After you have combined many Excel workbooks into one file, usually the next step is this: Merge all the imported sheets into one worksheet.

Because this is a whole different topic by itself, please refer to this article.

Image by MartinHolzer from Pixabay

If you’re a Microsoft Excel user, it doesn’t take long before you have many different workbooks full of important spreadsheets. What happens when you need to combine these multiple workbooks together so that all of the sheets are in the same place?

Excel can be challenging at times because it’s so powerful. You know that what you want to do is possible, but you might not know how to accomplish it. In this tutorial, I’ll show you several techniques you can use to merge Excel spreadsheets.

When you need to combine multiple spreadsheets, don’t copy and paste the data from each sheet manually. There are many shortcuts that you can use to save time in combining workbooks, and I’ll show you which one is right for each situation.

Watch & Learn

The screencast below will show you how to combine Excel sheets into a single consolidated workbook. I’ll teach you to use PowerQuery (also called Get & Transform Data) to pull together data from multiple workbooks.

Important: The email addresses used in this tutorial are fictitious (randomly generated) and not intended to represent any real email addresses.

Read on to see written instructions. As always, Excel has multiple ways to accomplish this task, and how you’re working with your data will drive which approach is the best.

1. How to Move & Copy Sheets (Simplest Method)

The easiest method to merge Excel spreadsheets is to simply take the entire sheet and copy it from one workbook to another.

To do this, start off by opening both Excel workbooks. Then, switch to the workbook that you want to copy several sheets from.

Now, hold Control (or Command on Mac) on your keyboard and click on all of the sheets that you want to copy to a separate workbook. You’ll notice that as you do this, the tabs will show as highlighted.

Now, simply right click and choose Move or Copy from the menu.

On the Move or Copy pop up window, the first thing that you’ll want to do is select the workbook that you want to move the sheets to. Choose the name of the file from the «To book» drop-down.

Also, you can choose where the sheets are placed in the new workbook in terms of sequence. The Before sheet menu controls where sequentially in the workbook the sheets will be inserted. You can always choose (move to end) and re-sequence the order the sheets later as needed.

Finally, it’s optional check the box to Create a copy, which will duplicate the sheets and create a separate copy of them in the workbook you’re moving the sheets to. Once you press OK, you’ll see that the sheets we copied are in the combined workbook.

This approach has a few downsides. If you keep working with two separate files, they aren’t «in sync.» If you make changes to the original workbook that you copied the sheets from, they won’t automatically update in the combined workbook.

2. Prepare to Use Get & Transform Data Tools to Combine Sheets

Excel has an incredibly powerful set of tools that are often called PowerQuery. Beginning with Excel 2016, this feature set was rebranded as Get & Transform Data. 

As the name suggests, these are a set of tools that helps you pull data together from other workbooks and consolidate it into one workbook.

Also, this feature is exclusive to Excel for Windows. You won’t find it in the Mac versions or in the web browser edition of Microsoft’s app.

Before You Start: Check the Data

The most important part of this process is checking your data before you start combining it. The files need to have the same setup for the data structure, with the same columns. You can’t easily combine a four-column spreadsheet and a five-column spreadsheet, as Excel won’t know where to place the data.

Often, you’ll find yourself needing to combine spreadsheets when you’re downloading data from systems. In that case, it’s much easier to make sure the system you’re downloading data is configured to download data in the same columns each time.

Before I download data from a service like Google Analytics, I always make sure that I’m downloading the same report format each time. This ensures that I can easily work with and combine multiple spreadsheets together.

Whether you’re pulling data from a system like Google Analytics, MailChimp, or an ERP like SAP or Oracle that powers huge companies, the best way to save time is to ensure that you’re downloading data in a common format.

Now that we’ve checked our data, it’s time to dive into learning how to combine Excel sheets. 

3. How to Combine Excel Sheets in a Folder Full of Files

A few times, I’ve had a folder full of files that I needed to put together into a single, consolidated file. When you’ve got dozens or even hundreds of files, opening them one-by-one to combine them just isn’t feasible. Learning this technique can save you dozens of hours on a single project.

Again, it’s crucial that the data is in the same format. To get started, it helps to place all of the files in the same folder so that Excel can easily watch this folder for changes. 

Step 1. Point Excel to the Folder of Files

On the pop-up window, you’ll want to specify a path to the folder that holds your Excel workbooks.

You can browse to that path, or simply paste in the path to the folder with your workbooks.

Step 2. Confirm the List of Files

After you show Excel where the workbooks are stored, a new window will pop up that shows the list of files you’re set to combine. Right now, you’re only seeing metadata about the files, and not the data inside of it.

This window simply shows the files that are going to be combined with our query. You’ll see the file name, the type, and the dates accessed and modified. If you’re missing a file in this list, confirm that all of the files are in the folder and retry the process.

To move on to the next step, click on Edit. 

Step 3. Confirm the Combination

The next menu helps to confirm the data inside your files. Since we’ve already checked that data is the same structure in our multiple files, we can simply click OK on this step.

Step 4. How to Combine Excel Sheets With a Click

Now, a new window pops up with the list of files we’re set to combine.

At this stage, you’re still seeing metadata about the files and now the data itself. To solve that, click on the double drop-down arrow in the upper right corner of the first column.

Voila! Now, you’ll see the actual data from inside the files combined into one place. 

Scroll through the data to confirm that all of your rows are there. Notice that the only change from your original data is that the filename of each source file is in the first column.

Step 5. Close and Load the Data

Believe it or not, we’re basically finished with combining our Excel spreadsheets. The data is in the Query Editor for now, so we’ll need to «send it back» to regular Excel so that we can work with it.

Click on Close & Load in the upper right corner. You’ll see the finished data in a regular Excel spreadsheet, ready to review and work with.

Imagine using this feature to roll up multiple files from different members of your team. Choose a folder that you’ll each store files in, and then combine them into one cohesive file with this feature in just a few minutes.

Recap & Keep Learning

In this tutorial, you learned several techniques for how to combine Excel sheets. When you’ve got many sheets that you need to stitch together, using one of these approaches will save you time so that you can get back to the task at hand!

Check out some of the other tutorials to level up your Excel skills. Each of these tutorials will teach you a method for accomplishing tasks in less time in Microsoft Excel.

How do you merge Excel workbooks? Let me know in the comments section below whether you’ve got a preference for these methods, or a technique of your own that you use.

Did you find this post useful?

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I recently got a question from a reader about combining multiple worksheets in the same workbook into one single worksheet.

I asked him to use Power Query to combine different sheets, but then I realized that for someone new to Power Query, doing this can be tough.

So I decided to write this tutorial and show the exact steps to combine multiple sheets into one single table using Power Query.

Below a video where I show how to combine data from multiple sheets/tables using Power Query:

Below are written instructions on how to combine multiple sheets (in case you prefer written text over video).

Note: Power Query can be used as an add-in in Excel 2010 and 2013, and is an inbuilt feature from Excel 2016 onwards. Based on your version, some images may look different (image captures used in this tutorial are from Excel 2016).

Combine Data from Multiple Worksheets Using Power Query

When combining data from different sheets using Power Query, it’s required to have the data in an Excel Table (or at least in named ranges). If the data is not in an Excel Table, the method shown here would not work.

Suppose you have four different sheets – East, West, North, and South.

Each of these worksheets has the data in an Excel Table, and the structure of the table is consistent (i.e., the headers are same).

Click here to download the data and follow along.

This kind of data is extremely easy to combine using Power Query (which works really well with data in Excel Table).

For this technique to work best, it’s better to have names for your Excel Tables (work without it too, but it’s easier to use when the tables are named).

I have given the tables the following names: East_Data, West_Data, North_Data, and South_Data.

Here are the steps to combine multiple worksheets with Excel Tables using Power Query:

1. Go to the Data tab.
2. In the Get & Transform Data group, click on the ‘Get Data’ option.
3. Go the ‘From Other Sources’ option.
4. Click the ‘Blank Query’ option. This will open the Power Query editor.
5. In the Query editor, type the following formula in the formula bar: =Excel.CurrentWorkbook(). Note that the Power Query formulas are case sensitive, so you need to use the exact formula as mentioned (else you will get an error). 
6. Hit the Enter key. This will show you all the table names in the entire workbook (it will also show you the named ranges and/or connections in case it exists in the workbook).
7. [Optional Step] In this example, I want to combine all the tables. If you want to combine specific Excel Tables only, then you can click the drop-down icon in the name header and select the ones you want to combine. Similarly, if you have named ranges or connections, and you only want to combine tables, you can remove those named ranges as well.
8. In the Content header cell, click on the double pointed arrow.
9. Select the columns that you want to combine. If you want to combine all columns, make sure (Select All Columns) is checked.
10. Uncheck the ‘Use original column name as prefix’ option.
11. Click OK.

The above steps would combine the data from all the worksheets into one single table.

If you look closely, you’ll find the last column (rightmost) has the name of the Excel tables (East_Data, West_Data, North_Data, and South_Data). This is an identifier that tells us which record came from which Excel Table. This is also the reason I said it’s better to have descriptive names for the Excel tables.

Here are a few modifications you can do to the combined data in Power Query itself:

1. Drag and place the Name column to the beginning.
2. Remove the “_Data” from the name column (so you’re left with East, West, North, and South in the name column). To do this, right-click on the Name header and click on Replace Values. In the  Replace Values dialog box, replace _Data with a blank.
3. Change the Data column to show only dates (and not the time). To do this, click the Date column header, go to the ‘Transform’ tab and change the Data type to Date.
4. Rename the Query to ConsolidatedData.

Now that you have the combined data from all the worksheets in Power Query, you can load it in Excel – as a new table in a new worksheet.

To do this. follow the below steps:

1. Click the ‘File’ tab.
2. Click on Close and Load To.
3. In the Import Data dialog box, select Table and New worksheet options.
4. Click Ok.

The above steps would combine data from all the worksheets and give you that combined data in a new worksheet.

One Issue You Must Resolve when Using This Method

In case you have used the above method to combine all the tables in the workbook, you’re likely to face an issue.

See the number of rows of the combined data – 1304 (which is right).

Now, if I refresh the query, the number of rows changes to 2607. Refresh again and it will change to 3910.

Here is the problem.

Every time you refresh the query, it adds all the records in the original data to the combined data.

Note: You’ll face this issue only if you have used Power Query to combine ALL THE EXCEL TABLES in the workbook. In case you selected specific tables to be combined, you’ll not face this issue.

Let’s understand the cause of this problem and how to correct this.

When you refresh a query, it goes back and follows all the steps that we took to combine the data.

In the step where we used the formula =Excel.CurrentWorkbook(), it gave us a list of all the tables. This worked fine the first time as there were only four tables.

But when you refresh, there are five tables in the workbook – including the new table that Power Query inserted where we have the combined data.

So every time you refresh the query, apart from the four Excel Tables that we want to combine, it also adds the existing query table to the resulting data.

This is called recursion.

Here is how to solve this issue.

Once you insert =Excel.CurrentWorkbook() in the  Power Query formula bar and hit enter, you get a list of Excel Tables. To make sure you only get to combine the tables from the worksheet, you need to somehow filter only these tables that you want to combine and remove everything else.

Here are the steps to make sure you only have the required tables:

1. Click the drop-down and hover the cursor on Text Filters.
2. Click on the Contains option.
3. In the Filter Rows dialog box, enter _Data in the field next to the ‘contains’ option.
4. Click OK.

You may not see any change in the data, but doing this will prevent the resulting table from being added over again when the query is refreshed.

Note that in the above steps we have used “_Data” to filter as we named out tables that way. But what if your tables are not named consistently. What if all the table names are random and have nothing in common.

Here is the way to solve this – use the ‘does not equal’ filter and enter the name of the Query (which would be ConsolidatedData in our example). This will ensure that everything remains the same and the resulting query table which is created is filtered out.

Apart from the fact that Power Query makes this entire process of combining data from different sheets (or even the same sheet) quite easy, another benefit of using it that it makes it dynamic. If you add more records to any of the tables and refresh the Power Query, it will automatically give you the combined data.

Important Note: In the example used in this tutorial, the headers were same. In case the headers are different, Power Query will combine and create all the columns in the new table. If the data is available for that column, it will be shown, else it will show null.

You May Also Like the Following Power Query Tutorials:

• Combine Data from Multiple Workbooks in Excel (using Power Query).
• How to Unpivot Data in Excel using Power Query (aka Get & Transform)
• Get a List of File Names from Folders & Sub-folders (using Power Query)
• Merge Tables in Excel Using Power Query.
• How to Compare Two Excel Sheets/Files
• How to Switch Between Sheets in Excel? (7 Better Ways)