Posts Tagged ‘workbook’

Working with Multiple Worksheets in MS Excel

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

Working with multiple worksheets concurrently is how MS Excel power users create and format a complex workbook with the least amount of effort expended.

Follow the steps below to make working with multiple sheets a piece of cake and you will be on your way to becoming a power user!

  •     Hold down the CTRL key as you click each tab top select multiple worksheets.
  •     To select a contiguous group of worksheets, click the first one in the group and then hold down the Shift key and click the last one in the group.
  •     To select all the worksheets in the current workbook, right-click any worksheet tab and choose Select All Sheets from the shortcut menu.
  •     To quickly make any sheet active, click its index tab; to remove a sheet from a selected group of sheets, hold down CTRL and click its tab.
  •     To remove the multiple selection and resume working with a single sheet, click any unselected sheet. If you have selected every sheet in the workbook, right-click any worksheet tab and choose Ungroup Sheets.
  •     If you have selected more than one sheet, you see the word Group in brackets in the title board, and any data you enter appears in the corresponding cells on each worksheet in the group. So, if you have grouped Sheet1, Sheet2 and Sheet3, entering text in cellA1 on Sheet1 also enters the same text in the corresponding cells on Sheet2 and Sheet3.
  •     Any choices you make such as applying a number format, affect all the grouped worksheets identically. If you are building a workbook with identically formatted sheets, you can use these techniques to quickly enter category headings, etc. along the top of each sheet.

You cannot use the Clipboard to enter data into multiple sheets concurrently. When you paste data, it only appears in the active sheet and not in any other sheets you have selected.

Print your Recurring MS Outlook Appointments

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a handy list of appointments that you have scheduled for recurring events? One might think that would be available in MS Outlook but alas, it is not. There is, however,  a way to get around MS Outlook’s limitation and print out a list of those recurring appointments.

You can export your calendar to MS Excel!   Once you have done that, you can then sort and filter the list and then print it.

Follow the steps below to learn how:

To export your calendar to Excel:

  1. In Outlook, click on File | Import And Export.
  2. Select Export To A File from the Choose An Action To Perform list.
  3. Click Next.
  4. Select Microsoft Excel 97 – 2003 from the Create A File Of Type list.
  5. Click Next.
  6. Click Calendar in the Select Folder To Export From list.
  7. Click Next.
  8. Click Browse and navigate to the folder where you would like to save the workbook.
  9. Name your workbook.
  10. Click OK.
  11. Click Finish.

Specify the appropriate date range for your export.

Once MS Outlook completes the export, ope the workbook and click the Calendar tab.

If there is no tab visible named Calendar, you may have to click around some to find your Calendar items.

You can use a filter to exclude all but the recurring items and then sort the filtered results to arrange them as necessary.

You can now print your filtered list!

Create a Drop-Down List From a Range of Cells in MS Excel

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

There are many reasons why one would want to create a drop-down list in MS Excel, but mostly I think, because it makes your data entry much easier and you can limit the entries to certain items that you can determine.

You can create a drop-down list of entries that is compiled from cells elsewhere on your worksheet and when you create the drop-down list, it will display a drop-down arrow next to that cell. When you want to select an item from that list, you can simply use the drop-down arrow and click the item that you want.

To create a drop-down list in MS Excel 2003, follow the steps below:

  • Use a single column or row without blank cells to create your valid entries for your drop-down list.

 

  • Make sure that you have sorted the list in the order in which you would like it to appear in your list.

You can use another worksheet or workbook if you like. To use a different worksheet in the same workbook:

  • Type the list on that worksheet.
  • Define a name, such as classes.
  • Select the range of cells.
  • Click the Name box at the left end of the Formula Bar.

  • Type the name for the cells.
  • Click Enter.

Pretty simple to do and it looks so very professional and is very helpful to boot!