Workbooks

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Workbooks' topic. 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.

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.

Calculating Only the Active Workbook
When you enter information into a workbook, Excel automatically recalculates every worksheet in every open workbook on your system. If you want to limit what is recalculated, you'll need some of the techniques described in this tip.

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.

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.

Combining Worksheets from Many Workbooks
Do you need to pull a particular worksheet out of a group of workbooks and combine those worksheets into a different workbook? You can make the task a breeze with the macros presented in this tip.

Creating Individual Workbooks
Workbooks can contain many worksheets. If you want to pull a workbook apart and create a whole series of workbooks based on each worksheet, here's the information you need.

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.

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.

Inserting Workbook Comments Into a Cell
One of the pieces of information that Excel can maintain relative to a workbook is a set of comments of your choice. There is no built-in way to copy these comments to a cell, but you can use a short macro to make short work of the need.

Invalid Names when Opening Workbook
Don't you hate opening a workbook and seeing error messages? If you see a message that some "invalid names" were detected in your workbook, this tip provides some ideas on how you can track down and solve the problem.

Losing Data in a Shared Workbook
When you create a shared workbook, you run the risk of losing some of the data in that workbook. Here's a discussion about why this occurs and what you can do about it.

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.

Merging Many Workbooks
If you need to combine the contents of a bunch of workbooks into a single workbook, the process can get tedious. Here's a handy macro that will quickly do the workbook amalgamation easily.

Opening a Workbook to a Specific Worksheet
When you open a workbook, Excel displays the worksheet that was visible when the workbook was last saved. You may want, instead, for the workbook to always display a specific worksheet when it is opened. Here's how to do it.

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.

Opening Multiple Workbooks at Once
Need to open a bunch of workbooks from within Excel? It's easy to do when you construct a selection set in the Open dialog box.

Opening Two Workbooks with the Same Name
If you have two workbooks that each have the same name, opening them at the same time in Excel could cause some problems. This tip examines why this is so and provides some ideas on how to get around the problems.

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.

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.

Problems with Default Workbook and Worksheet Templates
You can create a default template for both your workbooks and worksheets. These should be placed in the xlstart folder, but what if doing so causes problems when you start Excel?

Renaming a Workbook
Renaming a workbook from within Excel can seem daunting, but it is actually quite easy. All you need to do is use the Open dialog box as described in this tip.

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.

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.

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.

Speeding Up Opening and Saving a Workbook
Use a workbook for some time and you may find that it gets progressively slower to open and save. Here are some techniques you can use to speed up the use of the workbook.

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.

Unwanted Read-Only Workbook Status
Once a workbook assumes a "read-only" status, it can be a real pain to get that status removed. This tip explains why and explains what you can do about it.

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.

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.

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.

Working With Multiple Workbooks
Excel allows multiple workbooks to be open at the same time.

 

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