Excel® 2010 Bible

Chapter 3. Essential Worksheet Operations

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding Excel worksheet essentials

Controlling your views

Manipulating the rows and columns

This chapter covers some basic information regarding workbooks, worksheets, and windows. You discover tips and techniques to help you take control of your worksheets. The result? You'll be a more efficient Excel user.

3.1. Learning the Fundamentals of Excel Worksheets

In Excel, each file is called a workbook, and each workbook can contain one or more worksheets. You may find it helpful to think of an Excel workbook as a notebook and worksheets as pages in the notebook. As with a notebook, you can view a particular sheet, add new sheets, remove sheets, and copy sheets.

The following sections describe the operations that you can perform with worksheets.

3.1.1. Working with Excel windows

Each Excel workbook file is displayed in a window. A workbook can hold any number of sheets, and these sheets can be either worksheets (sheets consisting of rows and columns) or chart sheets (sheets that hold a single chart). A worksheet is what people usually think of when they think of a spreadsheet. You can open as many Excel workbooks as necessary at the same time.

Figure 3.1 shows Excel with four workbooks open, each in a separate window. One of the windows is minimized and appears near the lower-left corner of the screen. (When a workbook is minimized, only its title bar is visible.) Worksheet windows can overlap, and the title bar of one ...