Office 2011 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Chapter 14. Building Advanced Workbooks

Congratulations, you’ve mastered enough of Excel to input numbers, apply basic formatting and perform basic arithmetic on cells, rows and columns. In fact—you already have far more spreadsheet ability than most people.

If, on the other hand, you’re the kind of person who needs more than a glorified calculator, whose business depends on the flow of numbers, analysis, and projections, there’s still more to learn. This chapter covers the eerie realms of power in Excel, where spreadsheets and the workbooks that hold them become more complex. You’ll learn some tricks to help you work with very large spreadsheets and how to manage workbooks that hold several related spreadsheets in a single document. The exploration begins with named cells and ranges of cells. When you name a cell, you don’t have to remember its column/row address, but, as you’ll learn, there are even greater benefits to naming parts of your spreadsheet.

Naming Cells and Ranges

Computers are fine with numbers and codes, but we homo sapiens tend to prefer words. That’s why websites use domain names instead of Internet protocol numbers (their true addresses). Once your spreadsheet grows beyond the confines of your screen, you may find it difficult to scroll your way back to areas within it that you work on the most frequently. By designating a cell or group of cells as a named range, you can quickly jump to a certain spot without having to scroll around for it. You can use named cells ...