Topic: Workbooks

The following are additional topics related to the category listed above. A bracketed number after the topic indicates how many articles are related to that subject.

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available. Click the article's title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

Accessing a Problem Shared Workbook What are you to do is you share a workbook with others, and then suddenly the workbook won’t open properly? Dealing with a corrupted workbook can be a bother, but there are a few things you can try. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

Automatically Hiding Personal.xls If you leave your Personal.xls workbook visible from one Excel session to another, you may find that you unwittingly make changes you never intended to make. Here’s some ideas on how to protect the workbook or at least stop yourself from making those unwanted changes. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

Calculating Only the Active Workbook When you have automatic calculation turned on, Excel treats all your open workbooks the same and recalculates them all. You may not want this to occur; this tip explains how you can limit exactly what is recalculated so that you aren’t bogged down with recalculating huge workbooks all the time. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Closing a Read-Only Workbook When you create a workbook that is read-only, users can still make changes to the workbook. When they exit, they are prompted to save their changes to another workbook (since yours is read-only). If you don’t want users to be prompted to save their changes, you can use a simple macro that tricks Excel into thinking the workbook has already been saved. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

Closing All Open Workbooks Excel provides a handy (but little-known) shortcut for closing all the workbooks you have open. This tip explains how easy it is to use this shortcut. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Creating Individual Workbooks As a workbook grows, there may be a time when you need to “break out” all the worksheets to their own workbooks. This tip presents a way that you can easily—in one step—create a new workbook for each and every worksheet in your present workbook. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Duplicate Workbooks Opening If you ever open a workbook and always see two workbooks instead of one, chances are good the reason is because of the number of windows you’ve saved in the workbook. Here’s how to get back to only a single window being visible. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

Hanging When Opening a Workbook If you are opening a workbook and Excel seems to hang without ever fully loading, it could be due to a number of different causes. This tip provides some things you can check to get at your data. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

Losing Data in a Shared Workbook Shared workbooks are, unfortunately, prone to data corruption or loss. This tip examines one such data loss problem and proposes various solutions for the problem. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Making Changes in a Group of Workbooks Making changes in a workbook is easy. Making changes in hundreds of workbooks is not easy. This tip explains a variety of ways in which you can make quick work making changes to a group of workbooks. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

Merging Many Workbooks Got a whole slew of workbooks that you need to merge together? You can do it manually, but it could take you all day. It’s much better to use a macro to do the merging, and you can be done in a few minutes. This tip explains how you can develop such a macro and how it could save you time. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Opening a Workbook with Two Windows If you open a workbook and you notice that it shows two windows for the data, you may wonder how to get rid of one of those windows. Follow the steps in this tip, and you won’t be bothered by those extra windows any more. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Opening Multiple Workbooks at Once Excel allows you to open multiple workbooks all at the same time. All you need to do is know how to put together a “selection set” in the Open dialog box. This tip explains how you can accomplish this feat. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Opening Two Workbooks with the Same Name It is possible to have two workbooks that use the same file name, but on different drives or in different folders. If you try to open them both at the same time, Excel won’t let you. You can, however, open them in separate instances of the program. This tip explains how. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Printing a List of Named Ranges If your workbook has quite a few defined name ranges, then you may find it helpful to print out a list of those ranges for reference. This is easy to do using the steps in this tip. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Printing Workbooks in a Folder This tip presents two techniques you can use to print multiple workbooks all at the same time. Both techniques involve creating selection sets and then acting on those sets. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

Renaming a Workbook Want to rename a workbook without leaving Excel? It may be easy enough to do in Windows, but you can also use Excel’s Open dialog box to make the filename changes you desire. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Saving Changes in Personal.xls When you exit Excel and you’ve made changes to a workbook, the program asks if you want to save those changes. It can be frustrating if the request happens all the time relative to the Personal.xls workbook, particularly if you don’t make any changes to it. This tip explains what is really happening when this prompt to save keeps coming up. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Seeing All Open Workbook Names Having a lot of workbooks open in Excel at the same time presents some unique management challenges you won’t experience with only one or two open workbooks. This tip explains different ways that you can get a handle on the many workbooks you may have open at the same time. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Sharing Your Workbook Workbook sharing is a rather esoteric feature in Excel that enables multiple people to work on the same workbook at once. If you have this need, then you need this tip, which explains how to turn sharing on for a workbook. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Speeding Up Opening and Saving a Workbook When workbooks get very large, opening and saving them can seem to take forever. Here are a number of ideas on how you can make your large workbooks open and save faster. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Turning Off Sharing When you no longer want to share a workbook with multiple users, you need to turn the sharing feature off. This tip explains the quickest way to again make a workbook a single-user document. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Unwanted Read-Only Workbook Status If you have a workbook on a floppy disk, you might run into a problem where the workbook suddenly becomes “read-only.” This is typically caused by removing the workbook’s disk prematurely from the disk drive. This tip discusses why removing early isn’t a good idea, plus how you can again make the workbook modifiable. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Updating Links in Copied Files When you copy workbooks that contain links, you may be at a loss as to how to update those links. There are a couple of ways you can approach the task, as discussed in this tip. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

Upgrading a Personal.xls Workbook When you upgrade to Excel 2007, you may wonder if you also have to upgrade to the new format for your Personal workbook. The short answer is that yes, you should upgrade, and there should be no backward compatibility issues in doing so. Microsoft Excel versions: 2007

Using a Single Password for Multiple Workbooks If you have a group of password-protected workbooks linked through a common worksheet, you may get frustrated by the need to continually enter the password when clicking links to your workbooks. This tip examines an approach you can use that allows you to use a single password and still access all the workbooks you need to. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Working With Multiple Workbooks Excel allows multiple workbooks to be open at the same time. Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

More Topics

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

Problems with Dates?

Helpful Links

Great Info!

RSS Feeds