Worksheets And Workbooks Of Microsoft Excel


Excel allows you to create and edit one or more worksheets that you store in workbooks. In general, people work with a single worksheet for simple applications, such as a worksheet that an investor might use to analyze a single stock investment.

In general, Excel helps users prepare financial information, but you can manage other kinds of data in Excel, such as a project timeline. Excel even supports simple database routines. If your project needs multiple closely linked financial worksheets, you’ll keep those worksheets in one large workbook file.

A simple example may help to solve the difference between a workbook and a worksheet in your mind. A company with several divisions may create a workbook with annual sales for each division, and each division might be represented with its own tabbed worksheet inside the workbook. Anytime you create, open, or save an Excel file, you are working with a workbook. Often, that workbook contains only one worksheet. When that’s the case, the terms workbook and worksheet really are basically synonymous.

All Excel files end in the .xlsx filename extension. Excel 2007 introduces a new file format to maintain compatibility with the XML standard, but Excel 2007 still reads and writes worksheets from previous versions (which primarily had the .XLS extension).

Your workbook name is the filename you assign when you save the file. You can save Excel worksheets in some non-Excel formats as well, such as comma-separated values (.CSV) and text (.TXT) formats, as well as the HTML format for displaying on web pages. To save your work, click your Quick Access toolbar’s Save button, or click your Office button and select Save.

A worksheet is set up in a similar manner to a Word table, except that Excel worksheets can do much more high-end, numeric calculating than Word tables can. Initially, blank Excel workbooks contain three worksheets, named Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3. When you click a worksheet’s tab, Excel brings that worksheet into view. Initially, you’ll probably stay with one worksheet per workbook, so you’ll typically never have to click the secondary worksheet tabs to bring the other worksheets into view. Most users leave the second and third worksheets in their workbook file just because the minor trouble in deleting them isn’t worth the effort, and they don’t get in the way.

Each worksheet column has a column name; column names start with A, B, and so on. Each row has a number, starting with 1, 2, and so on. The combine of a row and a column, called a cell, also has a name, which comes from combining the column name and row number, such as C4 or A1. A1 is always the top-left cell on any worksheet. The gridlines throughout the worksheet help you distinguish between cells.

Each unique cell name is sometimes called the cell reference, and it is unique for each cell in the worksheet. The active cell or cells are always highlighted with a dark border. A cell’s location, also known as its name or cell reference, appears in the Worksheet’s Name box.