Microsoft® Office Excel® 2007 Inside Out

Outlining Worksheets

Many typical spreadsheet models are built in a hierarchical fashion. For example, in a monthly sales worksheet, you might have a column for each month of the year, followed by a totals column, which depends on the numbers in the month columns. You can set up the rows of data hierarchically, with groups of expense categories contributing to category totals. Office Excel 2007 can turn worksheets of this kind into outlines.

Figure 8-67 shows a table of sales figures before outlining, and Figure 8-68 shows the same worksheet after outlining. To accomplish this, we selected cell B3 in the table (any cell would do), clicked the Group menu on the Data tab, and clicked Auto Outline, as shown in Figure 8-67. (To outline a specific range, ...