Excel 2013: The Missing Manual

Chapter 4. Managing Worksheets

So far, you’ve learned how to create a basic worksheet with a table of data in it. That’s great for getting started, but as power users, professional accountants, and other Excel jockeys quickly learn, some of the most compelling reasons to use Excel involve multiple tables that share information and interact with each other.

For example, say you want to track the performance of your company. You create one table summarizing your firm’s yearly sales, another listing expenses, and a third analyzing profitability and making predictions for the coming year. If you create these tables in different spreadsheets, you must copy the information you want the sheets to share from one location to another, all without misplacing a number or making a mistake. What’s worse is that, with your data scattered in multiple places, you’re missing the chance to use some of Excel’s niftiest charting and analytical tools. But cramming a bunch of tables onto the same worksheet page isn’t the solution. Not only are you likely to lose your spot in the avalanche of data, you’ll face a host of formatting and cell-management problems.

Fortunately, a better solution exists. Excel lets you create spreadsheets with multiple pages of data, each of which can conveniently exchange information with other pages. Each page is called a worksheet, and a collection of one or more worksheets is called a workbook (which is also sometimes called a spreadsheet file).

In this chapter, you’ll learn ...