Changing tab colors and renaming sheets

You can add some flair and achieve greater workbook clarity with colored sheet tabs and sensible workbook names. In this workbook called SalesData, there is nothing really wrong with these sheet tabs here, but they don't have any color. And it would look a little bit better and maybe you use a color scheme in your organization. Maybe that East uses blue or the Midwest uses yellow and the row1 banners in here might be a key as to what we might want to do with our sheet tabs. So it's real simple. Simply right-click a sheet tab here, Tab Color, and depending upon the theme that you might be using, you'll get quite a few color selections at the top of this particular dialog box.

You can see some standard colors here. If you don't see anything quite to your liking, you might choose More Colors. Click on the tab called Standard if it's not already selected, and here is that honeycomb grid of 127 different colors, plus 15 down below with grays and blacks. Maybe I'll use a blue that more or less matches the banner heading. Just fine. We don't have to do this on every single one of course, but one more. Midwest. Tab Color. There is a yellow that I want matches the heading and so on. Easy to do, easy to change at different times. Not a major feature, but yet one that people want to know about and it's easily handled.

Sheet names can be up to 31 characters in length. If you have only five or six sheets, you know, perhaps make them longer. You want them to be on the one hand long enough to be readable and explain what the worksheet is about if possible. But if you had many, many sheets, like 15 or 20, long sheet names don't necessarily display that will across the bottom and you are not seeing that many sheet tabs, the more names you have. You can certainly right-click and rename a sheet tab that way. Nothing wrong with that. Just start typing down there.

I think it's better and faster just to double-click. Someone has decided here in management that these should be called Eastern, and Midwestern, and Southern, and Western. So I'll just double-click one of these, like East here. You can certainly edit these. As you double-click you can click after the T, ERN. I'll do the same thing. Here I'll double-click on Midwest, so on ERN, and so on. It doesn't take much time to these things. You can easily edit these. By the way, you can have spaces in sheet names, but as we'll see in a movie on linkage, it does make the issue of formulas, linkage formulas, slightly more involved.

I tend to not use spaces in sheet names, but it's not strictly wrong. If I do want to change this Sheet1 here, I'll just double-click and start typing in the name that I want. Maybe I am setting up a summary sheet. So it's fast and easy to change the sheet names. You can quickly adjust a sheets name as well as its tab color, as we showed earlier, to emphasize a workbook structure and to describe its content.