Selecting Worksheets

By default, each workbook consists of three worksheets whose names appear on tabs at the bottom of the Excel window. You can add or delete worksheets as desired. One advantage of having multiple worksheets within a workbook is that it enables you to organize your data into logical chunks . Another advantage of having separate worksheets for your data is that you can easily reorganize the worksheets (and the associated data) in a workbook.

Before you learn about the details of inserting, deleting, and copying worksheets, you should know how to select one or more worksheets. Selecting a single worksheet is a method of moving from worksheet to worksheet in a workbook.

Selecting multiple worksheets in a workbook, however, is another story. Selecting multiple workbooks enables you to apply the same AutoFormatting or cell formatting to more than one worksheet at a time. This is particularly useful in cases where you might have several worksheets in a workbook that will end up looking very much the same. For example, you might have a workbook that contains four worksheetseach of the worksheets serving as a quarterly summary. Because the design of these worksheets is similar, applying formatting to more than one sheet at a time enables you to keep the sheets consistent in appearance.

To select a worksheet or worksheets, perform one of the following actions:

• To select a single worksheet, click its tab. The tab becomes highlighted to show that the worksheet is selected.

• To select several neighboring or adjacent worksheets, click the tab of the first worksheet in the group and then hold down the Shift key and click the tab of the last worksheet in the group. Each worksheet tab will be highlighted (but only the first sheet selected will be visible).

• To select several nonadjacent worksheets, hold down the Ctrl key and click each worksheet's tab.

If you select two or more worksheets, they remain selected as a group until you ungroup them. To ungroup worksheets, do one of the following:

• Right-click one of the selected worksheets and choose Ungroup Sheets .

• Hold down the Shift key and click the tab of the active worksheet.

• Click any worksheet tab to deselect all the other worksheets.