Using Multiple Windows In Excel 2007
Author: A. Whiteman
Article: When working in Microsoft Excel 2007, it is almost certain that you will sometimes need to open more than one workbook at a time. Excel permits you to do this and to display and navigate between the various workbooks.
To open several Excel documents, click on the Office button and choose “Open. Naturally, you can only open several workbooks at once if they are in the same folder. To highlight a range of workbooks, click on the name of the first, hold down the Shift key on the keyboard and click on the name of the last.
To select individual files in an arbitrary fashion, click on the first file, hold down the Control key, click on the second, third, and so forth. You can also drag a selection rectangle around a series of files to highlight them. When you do so, make sure you start in blank space rather than starting on an item. Having highlighted the files that you want to open, click on the Open button.
Excel will then open each of the selected files in a maximised window. This means that you can only see one workbook at a time. To switch between workbooks, you can use the Windows taskbar and choose a particular name. You can also click on the View tab of the Excel Ribbon and here you’ll find the Switch Windows button. This contains a drop-down list of all the windows you currently have open. You can simply select a name to activate it.
The Window section of the View tab also features an option for tiling your Windows. Just click on the Arrange All button and choose the option “Tiled”. When you click OK, Excel will all the open files into separate small windows so that you can see the contents of all files simultaneously. To activate a workbook, simply click on any part of its window.
To exit tiled mode, click on the maximise button of any of the open workbooks. This action maximises all the open workbook windows so when you switch windows, you will find that all of them have been maximised.
Regardless of which display mode is currently active, you can always use your keyboard to switch between the various workbooks that you have open in Excel at any given time. To do this, hold down the Control key and press Tab.
A really great feature of Excel is the ability to switch workbooks when you are in the middle of creating a formula. This allows you to easily create formulas with external references. For example, let’s say you are creating a formula containing the VLOOKUP function but that the lookup table is in a separate workbook, just make sure that both workbooks are open before you start creating the formula. At the point where you need to enter the location of the lookup table, use any of the techniques shown above to switch documents then drag across the cells that contain the lookup table.
The The writer of this article is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Solutions, a UK IT training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007 Classes in London and throughout the UK.
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