Worksheets in excel 2007

Adding, Removing, and Hiding
Worksheets

Figure 4-4. Every time you click the Insert Worksheet
button, Excel inserts a new worksheet after your
existing worksheets and assigns it a new name. For
example, if you start with the standard Sheet1,
Sheet2, and Sheet3 and click the Insert Worksheet
button, then Excel adds a new worksheet named—you
guessed it—Sheet4.

Figure 4-5. Using the scroll buttons, you can
move between worksheets one at a time or jump
straight to the first or last tab. These scroll
buttons control only which tabs you see—you still
need to click the appropriate tab to move to the
worksheet you want to work on.

Tip

If you have a huge number of worksheets
and they don’t all fit in the strip of worksheet
tabs, there’s an easier way to jump around.
Right-click the scroll buttons to pop up a list
with all your worksheets.
You can then move to the worksheet you want by
clicking it in the list.

Warning

Be careful when deleting
worksheets, as you can’t use Undo (Ctrl+Z) to
reverse this change! Undo also doesn’t work to
reverse a newly inserted sheet.

Note

Although you’re limited to 255 sheets in a
new workbook, Excel doesn’t limit how many
worksheets you can add after
you’ve created a workbook. The only factor that
ultimately limits the number of worksheets your
workbook can hold is your computer’s memory.
However, modern day PCs can easily handle even the
most ridiculously large, worksheet-stuffed
workbook.

Figure 4-6. This workbook contains two hidden
worksheets. To restore one, just select it from
the list, and then click OK. Unfortunately, if you
want to show multiple hidden sheets, you have to
use the Unhide Sheet command multiple times. Excel
has no shortcut for unhiding multiple sheets at
once.

Naming and Rearranging Worksheets

Note

Excel has a small set of reserved names that
you can never use. To witness this problem, try to
create a worksheet named History. Excel doesn’t
let you because it uses the History worksheet as
part of its change tracking features (Section
23.3). Use this Excel oddity to impress
your friends.

Figure 4-7. Worksheet names can be up to 31
characters long and can include letters, numbers,
some symbols, and spaces. Remember, though, the
longer the worksheet name, the fewer worksheet
tabs you’ll be able to see at once, and the more
you’ll need to rely on the scroll buttons to the
left of the worksheet tabs. For convenience’s
sake, try to keep your names brief by using titles
like Sales04, Purchases, and Jet_Mileage.

Figure 4-8. When you drag a worksheet tab, a tiny page
appears beneath the arrow cursor. As you move the
cursor around, you’ll see a black triangle appear,
indicating where the worksheet will land when you
release the mouse button.

Tip

You can use a similar technique to create
copies of a worksheet. Click
the worksheet tab and begin dragging, just as you
would to move the worksheet. However, before
releasing the mouse button, press the Ctrl key
(you’ll see a plus sign [+] appear). When you let
go, Excel creates a copy of the worksheet in the
new location. The original worksheet remains in
its original location. Excel gives the new
worksheet a name with a number in parentheses. For
example, a copy of Sheet1 is named Sheet1 (2). As
with any other worksheet tab, you can change this
name.

Grouping Sheets

• Move, copy, delete, or hide the worksheets.

• Apply formatting to individual cells,
  columns, rows, or even entire worksheets.

• Enter new text, change text, or clear
  cells.

• Cut, copy, and paste cells.

• Adjust some page layout options, like paper
  orientation (on the Page Layout tab).

• Adjust some view options, like gridlines and
  the zoom level (on the View tab).

Figure 4-9. In this example, Sheet2 and Sheet3 are
grouped. When worksheets are grouped, their tab
colors change from gray to white. Also, in
workbooks with groups, the title bar of the Excel
window includes the word [Group] at the end of the
file name.

Tip

As a shortcut, you can select all the
worksheets in a workbook by right-clicking any tab
and choosing Select All Sheets.

As your workbook
grows,
you’ll often need better ways to manage the
collection of worksheets
you’ve accumulated. For example, you might want to
temporarily hide a number of worksheets,
or move a less important batch of worksheets
from the front (that is, the left side) of the
worksheet tab holder to the end (the right side).
And if a workbook’s got way too many worksheets,
you might even want to relocate several worksheets
to a brand new workbook.

It’s easy to
perform an action on a group of worksheets. For
example, when you have a group of worksheets
selected, you can drag them en masse from one
location to another in the worksheet tab holder.
To delete or hide a group of sheets, just
right-click one of the worksheet tabs in your
group, and then choose Delete or Hide. Excel then
deletes or hides all the
selected worksheets (provided that action will
leave at least one visible worksheet in your
workbook).

When you format
cells inside one grouped
worksheet, it triggers the same changes in the
cells in the other grouped
worksheets. So you have another tool you can use
to apply consistent formatting
over a batch of worksheets. It’s mainly useful
when your worksheets are all structured in the
same way.

For example, imagine you’ve
created a workbook with 10 worksheets, each one
representing a different customer order. If you
group all 10 worksheets together, and then format
just the first one, Excel formats all the
worksheets in exactly the same way. Or say you
group Sheet1 and Sheet2, and then change the font
of column B in Sheet2—Excel automatically changes
the font in column B in Sheet1, too. The same is
true if you change the formatting
of individual cells or the entire worksheet—Excel
replicates these changes across the group. (To
change the font in the currently selected cells,
just select the column and, in the Home → Font
section of the ribbon, make a new font choice from
the font list. You’ll learn much more about the
different types of formatting
you can apply to cells in Chapter
5.)

With
grouped worksheets, you can also modify the
contents of individual cells, including entering
or changing text and clearing cell contents. For
example, if you enter a new value in cell B4 in
Sheet2, Excel enters the same value into cell B4
in the grouped Sheet1. Even more interesting, if
you modify a value in a cell in Sheet2, the same
value appears in the same cell in Sheet1, even if
Sheet1 didn’t previously have a value in that
cell. Similar behavior occurs when you delete
cells.

Editing a group of worksheets
at once isn’t as useful as moving and formatting
them, but it does have its moments. Once again, it
makes most sense when all the worksheets
have the same structure. For example, you could
use this technique to put the same copyright
message in cell A1 on every worksheet; or, to add
the same column titles to multiple tables
(assuming they’re arranged in
exactly the same way).

Cut and paste
operations work the same way as entering or
modifying grouped cells. Whatever action you
perform on one grouped sheet, Excel also performs
on other grouped sheets. For example, consider
what happens if you’ve grouped together Sheet1 and
Sheet2, and you copy cell A1 to A2 in Sheet1. The
same action takes place in Sheet2—in other words,
the contents of cell A1 (in Sheet2) is copied to
cell A2 (also in Sheet2). Obviously, Sheet1 and
Sheet2 might have different content in cell A1 and
A2—the grouping
simply means that whatever was in cell A1 will now
also be in cell A2.

Excel keeps
track of printing and display settings on a
per-worksheet basis. In other words, when you set
the zoom percentage (Section
7.1.1) to 50% in one worksheet so you can
see more data, it doesn’t affect the zoom in
another worksheet. However, when you make the
change for a group of
worksheets, they’re all affected in the same
way.

Moving Worksheets from One Workbook to
Another

1. Open both spreadsheet
   files in Excel.

   The file that contains the worksheet you
   want to move or copy is called the
   source file; the other file
   (where you want to move or copy the worksheet to)
   is known as the destination
   file.

2. Go to the source
   workbook.

   Remember, you can move from one window to
   another using the Windows task bar, or by choosing
   the file’s name from the ribbon’s View → Windows →
   Switch Windows list.

3. Right-click the worksheet
   you want to transfer, and then, from the shortcut
   menu that appears, choose Move or
   Copy.

   If you want, you can transfer multiple
   worksheets at once. Just hold down the Ctrl key,
   and select all the worksheets you want to move or
   copy. Excel highlights all the worksheets you
   select (and groups them together). Right-click the
   selection, and then choose Move or Copy.

   When you choose Move or Copy, the “Move or
   Copy” dialog box appears (as shown in Figure
   4-10).

   

   Figure 4-10. Here, the selected worksheet is about to be
   moved into the SimpleExpenses.xlsx workbook. (The
   source workbook isn’t shown.) The SimpleExpenses
   workbook already contains three worksheets (named
   Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3). Excel inserts the new
   worksheet just before the first sheet. Because the
   “Create a copy” checkbox isn’t turned on, Excel
   removes the worksheet from the source workbook
   when it completes the transfer.

4. Choose the destination
   file from the “To book” list.

   The “To book” drop-down list shows all the
   currently open workbooks (including the source
   workbook).

   Tip

   Excel also lets you move your worksheets to
   a new workbook, which it automatically creates for
   you. To move them, choose the “(new book)” item in
   the “To book” list. The new workbook won’t have
   the standard three worksheets. Instead, it’ll have
   only the worksheets you’ve transferred.

5. Specify the position where
   you want the worksheet inserted.

   Choose a destination worksheet from the
   “Before sheet” list. Excel places the copied
   worksheets just before the
   worksheet you select. If you want to place the
   worksheets at the end of the destination workbook,
   select “(move to end).” Of course, you can always
   rearrange the worksheets after you transfer them,
   so you don’t need to worry too much about getting
   the perfect placement.

6. If you want to copy the
   worksheet, turn on the “Create a copy” checkbox at
   the bottom of the window.

   If you don’t turn this option on, then Excel
   copies the worksheet to the destination workbook
   and remove it from the current workbook. If you
   do turn this option on,
   you’ll end up with a copy of the workbook in both
   places.

7. Click
   OK.

   This final step closes the “Move or Copy”
   dialog box and transfers the worksheet (or
   worksheets).

Note

If there are any worksheet name conflicts,
Excel adds a number in parentheses after the moved
sheet’s name. For example, if you try to copy a
worksheet named Sheet1 to a workbook that already
has a Sheet1, Excel names the copied worksheet
Sheet1 (2).

The Basic Find

• Excel searches by comparing the content you
  enter with the content in each cell. For example,
  if you searched for the word
  Date, Excel identifies as a
  match a cell containing the phrase Date
  Purchased.

• When searching cells that contain numeric or
  date information, Excel always searches the
  
  display text.
  (For more information about the difference between
  the way Excel displays a numeric value—the
  underlying value Excel actually
  stores—see Section
  2.1.)

  For example, say a cell displays dates using
  the day-month-year format, like
  2-Dec-05. You can find this
  particular cell by searching for any part of the
  displayed date (using search strings like
  Dec or 2-Dec-05). But if you
  use the search string
  12/2/2005, you won’t find a
  match because the search string and the display
  text are different. A similar behavior occurs with
  numbers. For example, the search strings
  $3 and
  3.00 match the currency value
  $3.00. However, the search
  string 3.000 won’t turn up
  anything because Excel won’t be able to make a
  full text match.

• Excel searches one cell at a time, from
  left-to-right. When it reaches the end of a row,
  it moves to the first column of the next
  row.

1. Move to the cell where you
   want the search to begin.

   If you start off halfway down the worksheet,
   for example, the search covers the cells from
   there to the end of the worksheet, and then “loops
   over” and starts at cell A1. If you select a group
   of cells, Excel restricts the search to just those
   cells. You can search across a set of columns,
   rows, or even a non-contiguous group of
   cells.

2. Choose Home → Editing →
   Find & Select → Find, or press
   Ctrl+F.

   The «Find and Replace”
   window appears, with the Find tab selected.

   Note

   To assist frequent searches, Excel lets you
   keep the Find and Replace window hanging around
   (rather than forcing you to use it or close it, as
   is the case with many other dialog boxes). You can
   continue to move from cell to cell and edit your
   worksheet data even while the “Find and Replace”
   window remains visible.

3. In the “Find what” combo
   box, enter the word, phrase, or number you’re
   looking for.

   If you’ve performed other searches recently,
   you can reuse these search terms. Just choose the
   appropriate search text from the “Find what”
   drop-down list.

4. Click Find
   Next.

   Excel jumps to the next matching cell, which
   becomes the active cell. However, Excel doesn’t
   highlight the matched text or in any way indicate
   why it decided the cell was a
   match. (That’s a bummer if you’ve got, say, 200
   words crammed into a cell.) If it doesn’t find a
   matching cell, Excel displays a message box
   telling you it couldn’t find the requested
   content.

   If the first match isn’t what you’re looking
   for, you can keep looking by clicking Find Next
   again to move to the next match. Keep clicking
   Find Next to move through the worksheet. When you
   reach the end, Excel resumes the search at the
   beginning of your worksheet, potentially bringing
   you back to a match you’ve already seen. When
   you’re finished with the search, click Close to
   get rid of the “Find and Replace” window.

Find All

Figure 4-11. In the example shown here, the search for
“Price” matched three cells in the worksheet. The
list shows you the complete text in the matching
cell and the cell reference (for example, $C$1,
which is a reference to cell C1).

More Advanced Searches

Figure 4-12. In the standard “Find and Replace” window
(top), when you click Options, Excel gives you a
slew of additional settings (bottom) so you can
configure things like search direction, case
sensitivity, and format matching.

• If you want your search to span multiple
  worksheets, go to the Within box, and then choose
  Workbook. The standard option, Sheet, searches all
  the cells in the currently active worksheet. If
  you want to continue the search in the other
  worksheets in your workbook, choose Workbook.
  Excel examines the worksheets from left to right.
  When it finishes searching the last
  worksheet, it loops back and starts examining the
  first worksheet.

• The Search pop-up menu lets you choose the
  direction you want to search. The standard option,
  By Rows, completely searches each row before
  moving on to the next one. That means that if you
  start in cell B2, Excel searches C2, D2, E2, and
  so on. Once it’s moved through every column in the
  second row, it moves onto the third row and
  searches from left to right.

  On the other hand, if you choose By Columns,
  Excel searches all the rows in the current column
  before moving to the next column. That means that
  if you start in cell B2, Excel searches B3, B4,
  and so on until it reaches the bottom of the
  column and then starts at the top of the next
  column (column C).

  Note

  The search direction determines which path
  Excel follows when it’s searching. However, the
  search will still ultimately traverse every cell
  in your worksheet (or the current
  selection).

• The «Match case” option
  lets you specify whether capitalization is
  important. If you select “Match case”, Excel
  finds only words or
  phrases whose capitalization matches. Thus,
  searching for Date matches
  the cell value Date, but not
  date.

• The “Match entire cell contents” option lets
  you restrict your searches to the entire contents
  of a cell. Excel ordinarily looks to see if your
  search term is contained
  anywhere inside a cell. So,
  if you specify the word
  Price, Excel finds cells
  containing text like Current
  Price and even Repriced
  Items. Similarly, numbers like 32 match
  cell values like 3253, 10032, and 1.321. Turning
  on the “Match entire cell contents” option forces
  Excel to be precise.

Note

Remember, Excel searches for numbers as
they’re displayed (as opposed
to looking at the underlying values that Excel
uses to store numbers internally). That means that
if you’re searching for a number formatted using
the dollar Currency format ($32.00, for example),
and you’ve turned on the “Match entire cell
contents” checkbox, you’ll need to enter the
number exactly as it appears on the worksheet.
Thus, $32.00 would work, but 32 alone won’t help
you.

Finding Formatted Cells

1. Launch the Find
   tool.

   Choose Home → Editing → Find & Select →
   Find, or press Ctrl+F. Make sure that the
   «Find and Replace”
   window is showing the advanced options (by
   clicking the Options button).

2. Click the Format button
   next to the “Find what” search
   box.

   The Find Format dialog box appears (Figure
   4-13). It contains the same options as the
   Format Cells dialog box discussed in Section
   5.1.

   

   Figure 4-13. In the Find Format dialog box, Excel won’t
   use any formatting option that’s blank or grayed
   out as part of it’s search criteria. For example,
   here, Excel won’t search based on alignment.
   Checkboxes are a little trickier. In some versions
   of Windows, it looks like the checkbox is filled
   with a solid square (as with the “Merge cells”
   setting in this example). In other versions of
   Windows, it looks like the checkbox is dimmed and
   checked at the same time. Either way, this visual
   cue indicates that Excel won’t use the setting as
   part of its search.

3. Specify the format
   settings you want to look for.

   Using the Find Format dialog box, you can
   specify any combination of number format,
   alignment, font, fill pattern, borders, and
   formatting. Chapter 5 explains all these formatting
   settings in detail. You can also search for
   protected and locked cells, which are described in
   Chapter
   16.

4. When you’re finished,
   click OK to return to the “Find and Replace”
   window.

   Next to the “Find what” search box, a
   preview appears indicating the formatting of the
   cell that you’ll be searching for, as shown in
   Figure
   4-14.

   To remove these formatting restrictions,
   click the pop-up menu to the right of the Format
   button and then choose Clear Find.

Tip

Rather than specifying all the format
settings manually, you can copy them from another
cell. Just click the Choose Format From Cell
button at the bottom of the Find Format dialog
box. The pointer changes to a plus symbol with an
eyedropper next to it. Next, click any cell that
has the formatting you want to match. Keep in mind
that when you use this approach, you copy
all the format
settings.

Figure 4-14. The Find Format
dialog box shows a basic preview of your
formatting choices. In this example, the search
will find cells containing the word “price” that
also use white lettering, a black background, and
the Bauhaus font.

Finding and Replacing Values

• You can automatically
  change cell content. For example, you
  can replace the word Colour
  with Color or the number
  $400 with
  $40.

• You can automatically
  change cell formatting. For example,
  you can search for every cell that contains the
  word Price or the number
  $400 and change the fill
  color. Or, you can search for every cell that uses
  a specific font, and modify these cells so they
  use a new font.

1. Move to the cell where the
   search should begin.

   Remember, if you don’t want to search the
   entire spreadsheet, just select the range of cells
   you want to search.

2. Choose Home → Editing →
   Find & Select → Replace, or press
   Ctrl+H.

   The “Find and Replace” window appears, with
   the Replace tab selected, as shown in Figure
   4-15.

   

   Figure 4-15. The Replace tab looks pretty similar to the
   Find tab. Even the advanced options are the same.
   The only difference is that you also need to
   specify the text you want to use as a replacement
   for the search terms you find.

3. In the “Find what” box,
   enter your search term. In the “Replace with” box,
   enter the replacement text.

   Type the replacement text exactly as you
   want it to appear. If you want to set any advanced
   options, click the Options button (see the earlier
   sections “More Advanced Searches” and “Finding
   Formatted Cells” for more on your choices).

4. Perform the
   search.

   You’ve got four different options here.
   Replace All immediately
   changes all the matches your search identifies.
   Replace changes only the
   first matched item (you can then click Replace
   again to move on to subsequent matches or to
   select any of the other three options).
   Find All works just like the
   same feature described in the box in Section
   4.2.5. Find Next moves
   to the next match, where you can click Replace to
   apply your specified change, or click any of the
   other three buttons. The replace options are good
   if you’re confident you want to make a change; the
   find options work well if you first want to see
   what changes you’re about to make (although you
   can reverse either option using Ctrl+Z to fire off
   the Undo command).

Note

It’s possible for a single cell to contain
more than one match. In this case, clicking
Replace replaces every occurrence of that text in
the entire cell.

Spell Checking Options

Figure 4-17. The spell checker
options allow you to specify the language and a
few other miscellaneous settings. This figure
shows the standard settings that Excel uses when
you first install it.

• Ignore words in
  UPPERCASE. If you choose this option,
  Excel won’t bother checking any word written in
  all capitals (which is helpful when your text
  contains lots of acronyms).

• Ignore words that contain
  numbers. If you choose this option,
  Excel won’t check words that contain numeric
  characters, like Sales43 or
  H3ll0. If you don’t choose
  this option, then Excel flags these entries as
  errors unless you’ve specifically added them to
  the custom dictionary.

• Ignore Internet and file
  addresses. If you choose this option,
  Excel ignores words that appear to be file paths
  (like C:Documents and
  Settings) or Web site addresses (like
  http://FreeSweatSocks.com).

• Flag repeated
  words. If you choose this option, Excel
  treats words that appear consecutively (“the the”)
  as an error.

• Suggest from main
  dictionary only. If you choose this
  option, the spell
  checker doesn’t suggest words from the custom
  dictionary. However, it still
  accepts a word that matches
  one of the custom dictionary entries.

Figure 4-18. Excel starts you off with a custom
dictionary named custom.dic (shown here). To add
an existing custom dictionary, click Add and
browse to the file. Or, click New to create a new,
blank custom dictionary. You can also edit the
list of words a dictionary contains (select it and
click Edit Word List). Figure
4-19 shows an example of dictionary
editing.

Figure 4-19. This custom dictionary is fairly modest. It
contains three names and an unusual word. Excel
lists the words in alphabetical order. You can add
a new word directly from this window (type in the
text and click Add), remove one (select it and
click Delete), or go nuclear and remove them all
(click Delete All).

Note

All custom dictionaries are ordinary text
files with the extension .dic. Unless you tell it
otherwise, Excel assumes that custom dictionaries
are located in the Application
DataMicrosoftUProof folder in the
folder Windows uses for user-specific settings.
For example, if you’re logged in under the user
account Brad_Pitt, you’d find the custom
dictionary in the C:Documents and
SettingsBrad_PittApplication
DataMicrosoftUProof folder.