Part I: Getting Started with Excel
continued
After performing these steps, the worksheet is hidden and doesn’t appear in the Unhide dialog box.
Caution
Be careful! After you make a sheet very hidden, you can’t use the Properties box to unhide it because you aren’t able to select the sheet! To unhide such a sheet, press Alt+F11 to activate the Visual Basic Editor. Locate the workbook in the Projects window and select the name of the sheet that is very hidden. Press F4 to display the Properties box, in which you can change the Visible property back to –1 - xlSheetVisible n
To unhide a hidden worksheet, right-click any sheet tab and choose Unhide Sheet. Excel opens its Unhide dialog box that lists all hidden sheets. Choose the sheet that you want to redisplay and click OK. For reasons known only to a Microsoft programmer who is probably retired by now, you can’t select multiple sheets from this dialog box, so you need to repeat the command for each sheet that you want to unhide. When you unhide a sheet, it appears in its previous position among the sheet tabs.
Controlling the Worksheet View
As you add more information to a worksheet, you may find that navigating and locating what you want gets more difficult. Excel includes a few options that enable you to view your sheet, and sometimes multiple sheets, more efficiently. This section discusses a few additional worksheet options at your disposal.
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Zooming in or out for a better view
Normally, everything you see onscreen is displayed at 100%. You can change the zoom percentage from 10% (very tiny) to 400% (huge). Using a small zoom percentage can help you to get a bird’s- eye view of your worksheet to see how it’s laid out. Zooming in is useful if your eyesight isn’t quite what it used to be and you have trouble deciphering tiny type. Zooming doesn’t change the font size, so it has no effect on printed output.
Cross-Reference
Excel contains separate options for changing the size of your printed output. (Use the controls in the Page Layout Scale to Fit ribbon group.) See Chapter 9 for details. n
Figure 3.5 shows a window zoomed to 10% and a window zoomed to 400%.
FIGURE 3.5
You can zoom in or out for a different view of your worksheets.
You can easily change the zoom factor of the active worksheet by using the Zoom slider located on the right side of the status bar. Click and drag the slider, and your screen transforms instantly.
Another way to zoom is to choose View Zoom Zoom, which displays a dialog box. Choosing View Zoom Zoom to Selection zooms the worksheet to display only the selected cells (useful if you want a particular range of cells to fill the workbook window).
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Tip
Zooming affects only the active worksheet, so you can use different zoom factors for different worksheets. Also, if you have a worksheet displayed in two different windows, you can set a different zoom factor for each of the windows. n
Cross-Reference
If your worksheet uses named ranges (see Chapter 4), zooming your worksheet to 39% or less displays the name of the range overlaid on the cells. Viewing named ranges in this manner is useful for getting an overview of how a worksheet is laid out. n
Viewing a worksheet in multiple windows
Sometimes, you may want to view two different parts of a worksheet simultaneously — perhaps to make referencing a distant cell in a formula easier. Or you may want to examine more than one sheet in the same workbook simultaneously. You can accomplish either of these actions by opening a new view to the workbook, using one or more additional windows.
To create and display a new view of the active workbook, choose View Window New Window.
Excel displays a new window for the active workbook, similar to the one shown in Figure 3.6. In this case, each window shows a different worksheet in the workbook. Notice the text in the windows’ title bars: climate data.xlsx:1 and climate data.xlsx:2. To help you keep track of the windows, Excel appends a colon and a number to each window.
Tip
If the workbook is maximized when you create a new window, you may not even notice that Excel created the new window. If you look at the Excel title bar, though, you’ll see that the workbook title now has :2 appended to the name. Choose View Window Arrange All and choose one of the Arrange options in the Arrange
Windows dialog box to display the open windows. If you select the Windows of Active Workbook check box, only the windows of the active workbook are arranged. n
A single workbook can have as many views (that is, separate windows) as you want. Each window is independent. In other words, scrolling to a new location in one window doesn’t cause scrolling in the other window(s). However, if you make changes to the worksheet shown in a particular window, those changes are also made in all views of that worksheet.
You can close these additional windows when you no longer need them. For example, clicking the Close button on the active window’s title bar closes the active window but doesn’t close the other windows for the workbook.
Tip
Multiple windows make copying or moving information from one worksheet to another easier. You can use Excel’s drag-and-drop procedures to copy or move ranges. n
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FIGURE 3.6
Use multiple windows to view different sections of a workbook at the same time.
Comparing sheets side by side
In some situations, you may want to compare two worksheets that are in different windows. The View Side by Side feature makes this task a bit easier.
First, make sure that the two sheets are displayed in separate windows. (The sheets can be in the same workbook or in different workbooks.) If you want to compare two sheets in the same workbook, choose View Window New Window to create a new window for the active workbook. Activate the first window; then choose View Window View Side by Side. If more than two windows are open, you see a dialog box that lets you select the window for the comparison. The two windows appear next to each other.
When using the Compare Side by Side feature, scrolling in one of the windows also scrolls the other window. If you don’t want this simultaneous scrolling, choose View Window Synchronous Scrolling (which is a toggle). If you have rearranged or moved the windows, choose View Window Reset Window Position to restore the windows to the initial side-by-side arrangement. To turn off the side-by-side viewing, choose View Window View Side by Side again.
Keep in mind that this feature is for manual comparison only. Unfortunately, Excel doesn’t provide a way to actually point out the differences between two sheets.
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Splitting the worksheet window into panes
If you prefer not to clutter your screen with additional windows, Excel provides another option for viewing multiple parts of the same worksheet. Choosing View Window Split splits the active worksheet into two or four separate panes. The split occurs at the location of the cell pointer. If the cell pointer is in row 1 or column A, this command results in a two-pane split. Otherwise, it gives you four panes. You can use the mouse to drag the individual panes to resize them.
Figure 3.7 shows a worksheet split into two panes. Notice that row numbers aren’t continuous. The top pane shows rows 8 through 21, and the bottom pane shows rows 1020 through 1029. In other words, splitting panes enables you to display in a single window widely separated areas of a worksheet. To remove the split panes, choose View Window Split again.
FIGURE 3.7
You can split the worksheet window into two or four panes to view different areas of the worksheet at the same time.
Keeping the titles in view by freezing panes
If you set up a worksheet with row or column headings, these headings will not be visible when you scroll down or to the right. Excel provides a handy solution to this problem: freezing panes. Freezing panes keeps the headings visible while you’re scrolling through the worksheet.
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To freeze panes, start by moving the cell pointer to the cell below the row that you want to remain visible while you scroll vertically, and to the right of the column that you want to remain visible while you scroll horizontally. Then, choose View Window Freeze Panes and select the Freeze Panes option from the drop-down list. Excel inserts dark lines to indicate the frozen rows and columns. The frozen row and column remain visible while you scroll throughout the worksheet. To remove the frozen panes, choose View Window Freeze Panes, and select the Unfreeze Panes option from the drop-down list.
Figure 3.8 shows a worksheet with frozen panes. In this case, rows 1:4 and column A are frozen in place. This technique allows you to scroll down and to the right to locate some information while keeping the column titles and the column A entries visible.
FIGURE 3.8
Freeze certain columns and rows to make them remain visible while you scroll the worksheet.
The vast majority of the time, you’ll want to freeze either the first row or the first column. The View Window Freeze Panes drop-down list has two additional options: Freeze Top Row and Freeze First Column. Using these commands eliminates the need to position the cell pointer before freezing panes.
Tip
If you designated a range to be a table (by choosing Insert Tables Table), you may not even need to freeze panes. When you scroll down, Excel displays the table column headings in place of the column letters. Figure 3.9 shows an example. The table headings replace the column letters only when a cell within the table is selected. n
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FIGURE 3.9
When using a table, scrolling down displays the table headings where the column letters normally appear.
Monitoring cells with a Watch Window
In some situations, you may want to monitor the value in a particular cell as you work. As you scroll throughout the worksheet, that cell may disappear from view. A feature known as Watch Window can help. A Watch Window displays the value of any number of cells in a handy window that’s always visible.
To display the Watch Window, choose Formulas Formula Auditing Watch Window. The Watch Window appears in the task pane, but you can also drag it and make it float over the worksheet.
To add a cell to watch, click Add Watch and specify the cell that you want to watch. The Watch Window displays the value in that cell. You can add any number of cells to the Watch Window, and you can move the window to any convenient location. Figure 3.10 shows the Watch Window monitoring four cells.
FIGURE 3.10
Use the Watch Window to monitor the value in one or more cells.
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