Excel Worksheets
The worksheet is also referred to as the spreadsheet. Think of a workbook as a regular book, in that one book is the entire story, but each page contains a part of the story. Another example would be your personal budget. The entire workbook contains your budget, but you might have one page or worksheet for each month of the year.
The worksheet tabs appear at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the tab takes you directly to that page of your workbook. You can add more worksheets, delete them, change the worksheet title and add a color fill to the tab.
Adding, Deleting and Naming Worksheet Tabs
There are two common ways to add a worksheet. You can use the ribbon commands or use the right-click method. Let's start with the steps to using the ribbon commands.
- Start by going to the Home menu in the ribbon.
- Then, look in the Cells grouping of commands.
- Click on Insert.
- Choose Insert Sheet.
Not sure about you, but that's too many steps for me!
I prefer the right-click method. Right-click on any of the worksheet tabs, select Insert from the options menu and click on OK. That's it! Don't worry about the tab title at this point, that comes next.
You can follow the same right-click method to delete a worksheet as well. Right-click on the worksheet tab and choose Delete.
Let me share a quick tip with you. If all you need to do is add a sheet, there is a plus symbol next to the last sheet in the workbook. Click on the shortcut to insert a worksheet.
Now let's take a look at giving the worksheet tab a title. Something a little more detailed than Sheet 1, Sheet 2, Sheet 3, and so on. Again, as with all things related to computer applications, there is more than one way to get something accomplished. You can right-click on the tab and select Rename or you can just double-click directly on the tab title. I prefer the double-click method.
After you double-click on the title, Excel opens the text box for editing. Type in the new title and you are good to go. In the lesson video, our example is the personal budget workbook. Notice that we have 12 worksheet tabs, titled with each month of the year.
Adding Color and Modifying the Text
It is always nice to be able to add a bit of variety to the tabs with color. The steps to changing the tab color are about as simple as they can get. Right-click on the tab, choose Tab Color from the options menu to open the color palette and select a color. If you don't find what you want in the standard colors, click on More Colors. After you select your color, step off the tab (just click on a different tab). This will apply your selection to the tab.
Unfortunately, Excel does not let you change the color, size or font of the title text. However, Excel does a nice job of automatically changing the color of the font, depending on the background color - it actually changes it in order to create contrast.
Lesson Summary
This lesson reviewed the difference between a workbook and a worksheet. You learned that a workbook can have several worksheets or pages. Each page is referred to as a spreadsheet and they can be accessed using the worksheet tabs along the bottom of the screen.
Worksheet tabs can be added and removed by right-clicking on the tab and selecting either Insert or Delete. You can also rename the tab and change the tab fill color.
Using worksheet tabs can help to keep Microsoft Excel workbooks organized.
Learning Outcomes
After you've watched this video on how to modify the worksheet tab in Excel, you should be able to:
- Recall what a workbook is
- Describe the two common ways of adding a worksheet
- List the steps to adding color and modifying text
