Learn how to create and manage your first Workbook in Excel, how to add additional Worksheets to your document, and how to start working with cells, rows and columns.
Every Excel document is known as a Workbook, and every page or section of that workbook is called a Worksheet or Sheet. You can have an Excel Workbook that contains hundreds of sheets, although the limit is 255 for a newly started Workbook. Once a Workbook is created and saved, the number of sheets you can have is only limited by your available system memory.
In This Lesson…
- Creating a New Excel Workbook
- Rename and Save Your New Workbook
- Explore Your New Excel Workbook
- Working with Cells, Rows and Columns
- Add and Manage Worksheets
Creating a New Excel Workbook
1 – To open a new Excel Workbook, open Excel and click on Blank Workbook in the Home tab.
2 – You can also open a new Workbook from the New tab, which also contains several pre-made Excel templates.
3 – On the Home tab, you will see a list of recently opened and pinned Workbooks. Click any of these to open them in Excel.
4 – If you don’t see the Workbook you want to open listed here, click the Open tab and navigate to the file you want to open.
Rename and Save Your New Workbook
1 – To save an open Workbook, you can either click the Save button at the very top-left of the Excel window, or you can click File > Save/Save as.
2 – You can also use the standard Windows keyboard save shortcut Ctrl + S (Cmd + S in macOS).
3 – Give your Workbook a name and then choose the location on your computer that you want to save it to.
4 – By default, Excel will automatically save an AutoRecover point every 10 minutes. If you want to change this, click the File tab and then click Options > Save. You can change the AutoRecover interval to anything between 1 and 120 minutes.
Explore Your New Excel Workbook
There are three main areas of an Excel Workbook: The Tool Ribbon, the Address/Formula bar, and the Worksheet display.
1 – The Ribbon
This is where you find most of the Excel Workbook tools. The Ribbon is divided into tabbed sections such as Home, Insert, Formulas, etc. Clicking on any of the tabs will show the most commonly-used tools for that section in the Ribbon.
2 – The Address/Formula bar
This section comprises three tools that will become an essential part of how you use Excel. On the left is the Address display, which shows the currently selected cell name (A1, B6, etc.,) Next to this is the Insert Function tool. Click the Fx button to choose and insert a specific Excel function. The final part of this section is the Formula bar, which displays the formula (if one is in use) for any selected cell or cell range.
3 – Worksheet Display
The main area of the Workbook displays the current Worksheet. Each Sheet is made up of hundreds of cells (the number of cells a Worksheet can contain is over 17 billion…) in rows and columns. Rows are labelled with numbers and columns with letters. At the bottom-left of the Worksheet is a tab displaying its name. To add a new Sheet, click the + button next to this tab.
Working with Cells, Rows and Columns
These are the structures that make up a Worksheet in Excel, and you will need to get used to working with terms such as cells, cell groups, cell ranges, columns, and rows.
Selecting Cells
1 – When you move your mouse pointer over the worksheet it will change to a + icon. Single-click on any cell to select it. The cell will be highlighted with a darker outline.
2 – If you double-click on a cell, the typing cursor will appear, but you don’t need to do this to start entering data into a cell.
3 – To select multiple cells at once (called a range), you can click and drag the cursor until the outline encloses the cells you want to select.
4 – You can use the arrow keys on your computer keyboard to move the cell selection around your Worksheet. If you hold the Shift key and then use the arrow keys, you can select multiple cells.
Selecting a Row or Column
1 – If you need to select everything in a particular row or column of your Worksheet, just click on either the number of the row or the letter of the column.
2 – If you want to select the entire worksheet, click the small grey arrow where the row and column name bars meet (just below the address bar).
Focus On and Select a Specific Cell
1 – If you have a particularly big Worksheet, with lots of rows and columns, you can move the selection to a specific cell by typing the cell name in the Address bar. Tap Return and the cell you entered will be selected.
2 – If you want to move to and select a range of cells, you can type the range into the Address bar instead. This is written, as an example, as D45:D56.
Adjust Column Width and Row Height
You can change the width of any column and the height of any row quite easily in your Excel Worksheet.
1 – The quickest way to alter the width of a column is to click and hold on the line between the column labels (A, B, C, etc.,) and drag it until the desired width is achieved. Do the same on the line between row numbers to change the height of a row.
2 – If you need a more accurate way to resize columns, you can right-click on the column letter and then select Column Width from the menu. You can then enter the width value you need and click OK. Do the same on a row number to change the row height.
3 – You can select multiple row numbers or column letters and then right-click and use the resize option to set the heights or widths of all selected rows/columns.
Add and Manage Worksheets
As mentioned earlier, a Workbook can contain as many sheets as you need, up to the limit of your computer memory. Excel projects will normally rarely need more than a few sheets. Adding and managing new Worksheets is easy.
1 – Your Worksheets are displayed at the bottom-left of the Workbook window. By default, the first sheet will be called “Sheet1”. To add a new sheet, click the + button next to the name tab.
2 – To rename any Worksheet, select it and then double-click on the name. You can then type the new name for the sheet. You can also right-click on the sheet name tab and select Rename from the menu.
3 – To change the order that the sheets appear in the Worksheets tabs, click and hold on any tab and drag the sheet to its new order position.
4 – To delete a Worksheet, right-click on the sheet name tab and select Delete from the menu.
5 – To make sheets more distinct from each other, you can change the colour of the sheet name tab. Right-click on the tab and select Tab Colour. Then choose a new colour from the panel that pops out.
Change Worksheet View
At the bottom-right of the Excel Workbook window are a few controls for changing how a Worksheet is displayed. These controls include buttons for changing to Page Layout, and Normal view, as well as a slider to change the zoom level on the sheet.
Any changes you make here only apply to the sheet you are currently viewing or have selected.