Excel® 2007 Bible

Chapter 8. Understanding Excel’s Files

<feature><title>In This Chapter</title>

• Creating a new workbook

• Opening an existing workbook

• Saving and closing workbooks

• Sharing workbooks with those who use an older version of Excel

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Excel, of course, uses files to store its workbooks. This chapter discusses how Excel uses files and provides an overview of the various types of files.

It also discusses the new Excel 2007 file formats and describes how to determine what (if anything) will be lost if you save your workbook in an earlier file format.

Excel File Operations

This section describes the operations that you perform with workbook files: opening, saving, closing, deleting, and so on.

As you read through this section, remember that you can have any number of workbooks open simultaneously, and that only one workbook is the active workbook at any given time. The workbook’s name appears in its title bar (or in the Excel title bar if the workbook is maximized).

Creating a new workbook

When you start Excel normally, it automatically creates a new (empty) workbook called Book1. This workbook exists only in memory and has not been saved to disk. By default, this workbook consists of three worksheets named Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3. If you’re starting a new project from scratch, you can use this blank workbook.

Excel provides two ways to create a new workbook:

• Choose Office New (which opens the ...