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Each Excel 2007 document is a container referred to as a workbook. Workbooks, in turn, are made up of worksheets and it is the worksheets that actually store your information. Although the number of worksheets which a workbook may contain is limited only by available memory, for most computer users, there will be a practical limit of a few dozen. If a workbook contained hundreds of sheets, it would operate extremely slowly.

The controls for navigating and manipulating worksheets are located in the bottom left of the Excel document window. Each worksheet has a named tab which identifies and is used to activate it. As well as worksheets, Excel allows the user to create chart (and other) sheets. Each of these will also have a tab of its own.

Whenever you insert a new sheet into a workbook, Excel automatically assigns is a default name consisting of the word “Sheet” followed by a number. The easiest way of changing this default name is to double-click on the worksheet tab and either modify the name or simply type a completely new one. It is also possible to right-click on a sheet tab and choose rename. The Rename command may also be accessed in the Format section of the Cells group of the Home Tab.

If you have a sheet name which is rather long or in some way difficult, it is also possible to copy and paste the name from somewhere else. Simply use Control-C to copy any piece of text, double-click on a sheet tab and use Control-V to paste the text.

Another way of making tabs easily identifiable is to assign them colours. For example, if we have worksheets containing monthly sales figures interspersed with sheets containing quarterly analysis, we might assign a different colour for each quarter.

You would start by selecting the quarter one sheet then, holding down the Control key, click on the tabs containing the figures for January, February and March. Next, to set the colour of the selected tabs, choose Format Colour in the Format section of the Cells group of the Home Tab. You could then do the same to the sheets in the other three quarters.

As more and more sheets are added to a given workbook, the fact of having different colours for certain types of sheet offers us another way of identifying and finding information quickly. Assigning colours to sheet tabs can also allows Excel users to conform to standards which may already exist within their organisations, for example, where a given colour is used to represent worksheets containing data of a certain type.

Author is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Solutions, a UK IT training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007 training courses at their central London training centre.

Microsoft Excel has a number of different ways of changing the width of columns and the height of rows. The width of columns is specified in characters. By default, every column has a width of just over eight characters. This means that if you’re using the spreadsheets primarily for numerical data, you can enter eight digits in each column using the default width.

If you plan to change the default width, it makes sense to do so before you start entering data into your worksheet. For example, if you know that you’ll be typing fairly short entries in each column, you might want to reduce the default width. To change the default width, go to the Cells section of the Home Tab of the Excel Ribbon. Click on the Format button and choose Default Width from the drop-down. In the dialog box which appears, you will see Excel’s standard column width of approximately 8 characters. Simply type a new entry and click OK.

As long as you haven’t changed the width of a column using any other technique, you can change the default width at any time and any cells that have been left at the default width will automatically change to reflect the new setting.

The second way of changing column widths is to use Excel’s AutoFit feature. This automatically adjusts the width of a column to ensure that the contents of the selected cells are completely visible. To AutoFit individual columns, highlight the cells that you want Excel to take into account or simply highlight the entire column. Next, position the cursor on the right hand edge of the column and double-click.

To AutoFit data in a range of columns, you can either select a range of data across several columns or highlight several entire columns. With your selection in place, choose Format then AutoFit Column Width in the Cells group of the Home Tab on the Excel Ribbon.

When using Excel’s AutoFit feature, it’s inevitable that you’ll end up with columns that have different widths. If you want a range of columns to have exactly the same width then simply select the range and choose Format then Column Widths and enter the required width.

Excel also allows you to interactively adjust the width of columns. To do this, position the cursor on the right hand edge of the column. When the cursor changes to a double arrow, click, hold and drag. As you drag, the width of the column is displayed both in characters and in pixels. This technique can be used either to adjust the width of a single column or a range of columns.

The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007 Classes in London and throughout the UK.

Excel offers a number of different ways of inserting new sheets into your workbooks. One of the simplest is to use the Insert Worksheet button. This is located on the right-hand side of the worksheet tabs. Regardless of which worksheet is active, clicking this button will always insert a worksheet as the last tab in your workbook.

It is also possible to create a worksheet at a given position within the workbook. For example, let’s say we are working on a workbook containing a record of the invoices issued by a company in each month of the year. We have twelve worksheets named “January”, “February”, and so on. We would now like to insert quarterly analysis sheets at the end of each quarter.

As with columns, Excel will always insert new worksheets to the left of the currently selected tab. Therefore in order to insert the first quarterly analysis sheet, we need to select April. However, as we have already seen, we can’t use the Insert Worksheet button to insert the new sheet or it will always go at the end. So, instead of this, we use the Insert command in the Cells section of the Home Tab of the Excel Ribbon.

Another way of doing the same thing is to right-click on the “April” tab and choose Insert. Excel then asks us to specify the type of sheet we want to insert. We can insert a worksheet, we can insert a chart sheet, a backwardly compatible macro sheet or dialog sheet. The backwardly compatible options persist because they are sometimes useful for Excel developers. In addition to these presets, we can insert one of Excel’s pre-created spreadsheet solutions such as the billing statement or sales report. To add a worksheet, in the General tab of the Insert dialogue, highlight the worksheet button then click OK.

We would then rename the sheet; let’s say “Qtr1 Analysis” and repeat the same procedure to insert analysis sheets to the left of the “July” and “October” tabs. The analysis sheet of the fourth quarter will be the last sheet in the workbook. We can only insert a worksheet in this position by using the Insert Worksheet button.

To delete the selected worksheet, use the Delete Sheets command in the Cells group of the Home Tab of the Excel Ribbon. It is also possible to delete a sheet by right-clicking the sheet tab and choosing Delete from the context menu. To delete several sheets at once, highlight the relevant tabs and then using the Delete Sheet command.

Selecting several sheets at once requires the use of the classic Windows techniques of Shift-click and Control-click. To select a contiguous range of worksheet tabs, click on the first then, while holding down the Shift key, click on the last. To select a non-contiguous range, click on the first then, while holding down the Control key, click on each of the others.

To deselect a non-contiguous range of selected of tabs, click on any tab which isn’t selected. If all tabs in a workbook are selected, simply click on the name of any tab to select only that tab.

The author is a trainer and developer with OnSiteTrainingCourses.Com, a UK IT training company offering Microsoft Excel training courses at their central London training centre.