Worksheet Manipulation in Excel 2007
Microsoft Excel offers a number of different ways of inserting new sheets into your workbooks. One of the most straightforward methods is to use the Insert Worksheet button. This can be found to the right of the worksheet tabs. Irrespective of which worksheet is active, clicking this button will always insert a worksheet as the last tab in your workbook.
It is also possible to create a worksheet at a given position within the workbook. For example, let’s say we are working on a workbook containing a record of the invoices issued by a company in each month of the year. We have twelve worksheets named “January”, “February”, and so on. We would now like to insert quarterly analysis sheets at the end of each quarter.
As with columns, Excel inserts new worksheets to the left of the currently selected tab. Therefore to insert the first quarterly analysis sheet, we would select April. However, as we’ve seen, we can’t use the Insert Worksheet button to insert the new sheet or it will always go at the end. So instead, we use the Insert command in the Cells section of the Home Tab of the Excel Ribbon.
Alternatively, we could right-click on the “April” tab and choose Insert. Excel then asks us to choose the type of sheet we want to insert. In addition to a worksheet, we can insert a chart sheet, a backwardly compatible macro sheet or dialog sheet. These options are sometimes useful for Excel developers. In addition we can insert one of Excel’s pre-created spreadsheet solutions such as the billing statement or sales report. To insert a worksheet, in the General tab of the Insert dialogue, highlight the worksheet button then click OK.
The next step is to rename the sheet; for example, “Qtr1 Analysis”. We then repeat the same procedure to insert analysis sheets to the left of the “July” and “October” tabs. Since the analysis sheet of the fourth quarter will be the very last sheet in the workbook, we must use the Insert Worksheet button to create it.
To delete the selected worksheet, use the Delete Sheets command in the Cells group of the Home Tab of the Excel Ribbon. It is also possible to delete a sheet by right-clicking the sheet tab and choosing Delete from the context menu. To delete several sheets at once, highlight the relevant tabs and then using the Delete Sheet command.
Selecting multiple sheets involves 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, hold down the Shift key and click on the last. To select a non-contiguous range of tabs, click on the first, hold down the Control key and click on each of the others.
To deselect a selected range of tabs, click on any tab which isn’t selected. If all tabs are selected, simply click on the name of any tab to select only that tab.
The author is a trainer and developer with OnSiteTrainingCourses.Com, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel training courses at their central London training centre.
