Cells and Sheets

You are here:
< Back

In this post we will try to understand Cells and Sheets in excel-two basic concepts to know about when you start learning excel.

Cells

Cell is the rectangular grid that is the basic building block of excel. Cell is the basic storage unit in excel that stores value. We could also define a cell is the intersection of a row and a column in excel.

In the pic shown below the row is 3(3) and the column is B(2) and the intersection of row 3 and column B  is cell B3 denoted by cell address B3(1).

The value in the cell B3 is 124(4) and the cell can contain values of any data type e.g. numeric,text,date, time etc.

showing cell, rows, cell address and cell intersection

There are several formatting options that are available in excel to format cell, cell value , cell border etc which we have explained in a different section.

Sheets

By default an excel workbook contains 3 sheets, a sheet is made up of cells that are used to store and manipulate data in excel.

picture showing default sheet names

You could see three sheets at the bottom of an excel workbook, you could traverse through the sheets by clicking on their name at the bottom.

How to Add/Insert sheet in excel

Suppose we are to add another data table in a different sheet in the same workbook, to do that just click on the “+” symbol in the older version or the page looking symbol in the latest version of excel as shown the in the fig below.

figure showing how to insert sheet in excel

How to rename a worksheet in excel

By Default the name of the sheets are Sheet1, Sheet2….SheetX…etc and you can easily rename the sheet by just double clicking on sheet name or from the right click menu on sheet name as shown below.

figure showing how to rename a sheet in excel

rename sheet in excel

I have changed the name of the sheet from “Sheet3” to “My Sheet”.

How to delete a worksheet in excel

We could delete a sheet if the sheet is no longer needed in the workbook by right clicking on sheet name as shown below.

figure showing how to delete a sheet in excel

I have right clicked “My Sheet” and you could see the delete option to delete the sheet.

How to Copy/Move a worksheet

Suppose we have to make a copy of a sheet or we want to change the position of the sheet i.e. if the sheet is positioned at far right side we want that sheet to be at the first sheet from left then we could follow  below process.

Right click on the sheet that you want to make a copy of, and select “Move or copy” option as shown in the pic below and select the sheet after/before of which you want the copy to appear.

table explaining how to move or copy sheet in excel

Here i intend to create a copy of “My Sheet” and place it before “Sheet2” in the same workbook, don’t forget to check the “Create a copy” option at the bottom to create a copy or excel would move the sheet.

You could also pick and drop the sheet simply by dragging the sheet to the desired location as shown below in the pic.

how to move excel sheet by dragging

You could copy/move the sheet in a different workbook also by selecting the workbook in which you want to place the sheet by drop down from Move or Copy menu box as shown in the earlier fig.

Random Posts