Moving, copying, and grouping sheets

- You can change the order of a sheet, bottom of the sheet we can simply move the sheet left to right. We can also make a copy of a sheet when needed, and at different times we can select multiple sheets and make changes to all of them at the same time. We're in the workbook 09 regional sales at the moment the east sheet is visible. As I click the tab for Midwest, keep an eye on column A and row two. They're the same in all of these. The zoom factors a little different so we might want to make that a bit more consistent, and we might eventually want to change the look of all of them so that the row seven data is bumped down into row eight.

So, first of all to move a sheet, maybe we decided that the south sheet belongs to the left of Midwest, we'll simply click and drag the south tab to the left. Maybe we change our minds later, we can drag it the other way or we can drag the Midwest to the left. Now, sometimes we want to make a copy. Maybe eventually what we'd like to have is a summary sheet that looks like just all the others but its going to be tabulating data from the other cells. That might be easy to do if we just copy one of our sheets. So how do we make a copy of a sheet? The easiest way is to simply drag a sheet tab, now remember that's how you move a sheet, but if you also hold down the control key there's a tiny little plus associated with that icon for a sheet, drag it rightward, with the control key held down, you should've let go of the mouse first.

You've made a copy. As I click back and forth on these, the main portion of the screen doesn't change at all, so these two sheets for the moment are identical except for their names. Now if I really were going to turn this into a summary sheet I'd double click and change the name, also change the name in A1 and so on. But we're not going to do that. I'm simply gonna get rid of the sheet. I'll right click and delete it. And back to the west sheet. There could be times where you want to copy a sheet to a different workbook.

If I right click on this sheet tab right now and go to the command move or copy, I could decide to put this somewhere in this worksheet or, there's a drop arrow, I could put this into a new workbook. Create a copy, click okay, and suddenly we'll be looking at a new workbook. It'll have a name like book one, two, three as we see at the top of the screen here. And this is a copy of the sheet from the other workbook. We now have two workbooks open and we can quickly get back and forth with control tab if necessary.

On the new workbook here, we're back to the other one. Eventually we might save that other workbook, but for now lets shift the focus back here. Sometimes, you're looking at the data as we suggested earlier, similar layout and everything. Lets make a change to all these at once, including the zoom factor. So how do we select multiple sheets? If we want to select the whole cluster of sheets, of consecutive sheets, click the first sheet, hold down the shift key, click the last sheet, in this case west. Those are all selected, look at the top of the screen, the file name is followed by the word group within brackets.

Keep an eye on that. I reminds us that we have two or more sheets grouped. If I write click row seven right now and insert, that's happening on all the grouped sheets. Ill click the south sheet, happened there. Midwest sheet, west. I want the active cell in all cases right now to be cell A1. I'll click there, that's happened on all sheets. If I want to change the zoom factor, lower right hand corner, its different on the different sheets, I'll just drag that rectangle left to right they're going to be that big.

That's happened on all the sheets at the same time. As we click back and forth. And how about the column adjustments? Lets make those be the same. We'll drag across these columns, I'll simply double click, and this is happening on all four sheets. You've gotta remember that they are grouped. The display at the bottom certainly looks different and the word group is at the top of the screen. I remember once forgetting that and making a change to a cell here, and that happened on all four sheets. And I really didn't want that to happen. How do we ungroup? We can either click on one of the sheets that's not part of the group, or right click the current sheet tab and ungroup sheets.

You can also group non-consecutive sheets. That's less likely to be used, and particularly in this example here, but if I wanted to make a change to the east sheet and the Midwest sheet, the east sheet is already selected, I hold down the control key, click the Midwest sheet, if I make a change now it appears only on these two sheets. I'm done making the change I can right click on any of the tabs, say east, and ungroup the sheets. So its easy to group sheets so we can make changes on all these different sheets at the same time.

And as we saw earlier, it's easy to move a sheet and to copy a sheet.