Other Excel Add-In, Templates and Training
Lesson 1B
Workbooks
Every single time you start Excel you are, by default, creating a
New Blank Workbook. The name of your Workbook has the default name of
Book1, until you save the Workbook as a different name. A
Workbook is like the outer shell of the spreadsheet and contained
within it are the Worksheet(s) and cells.
When you start Excel you should first see a blue bar at the very
top of your screen. This is called the Title Bar. The title bar
is where you will see the name of your Workbook once you have saved
it. (Note that if you have not yet saved a Workbook, the default will
probably be Book1). As you are familiar with Windows, you will notice
to the right of the Title Bar the Minimise (hyphen), Restore
(two squares) and Close (X) buttons.
Saving Workbooks
There are many formats that we can save our data in Excel as, but
by far the most common is the default *.xls. (The
asterisk represents your chosen file name). Some of the other popular
formats are the *.xlt (Template) *.txt (Tab delimited),
*.xml (Extensible Markup Language - available in newer versions
only) and *.web page (obviously a web page).
To see what we mean go to
File>Save As... and Excel will
display the Save As dialog box (dialog boxes will be discussed
later). This is where you initially give your Workbook a name (File
name:), nominate a file type (Save as type:) and a location
(Save in:). We say "initially" as once you have saved a Workbook
for the first time it will, by default, always save as that File name,
type and location you have nominated each time you save.
If you select
the drop arrow to the right of the Save as type: box you will
see a list of all different types of formats an Excel Workbook can be
saved as. You may notice that there are different choices of the .xls
types. These different types are for backward compatibility with
previous versions of Excel. You can also save the Workbook as multiple
versions although, we strongly recommend doing this ONLY if you need
to, as it will increase the file size by 10-50% and render some of
Excel’s newer features as unusable.
When
you are saving a Workbook for the first time Excel will display the
Save As dialog box no matter which method we use to save. There
are a number of ways to save a workbook, the most common ways that can
be used are:
If we close a
Workbook that we have made changes to, Excel will ask us (via a message box) if
we wish to save the changes we have made. If we close a Workbook without making
any changes, no message will appear and Excel will close without saving. We will
look at closing a Workbook below.
Creating More New Workbooks
Just because we
have one Workbook open does not mean we cannot create more Workbooks, in fact
the only limit to the amount of Workbooks we can have open is restricted by the
available memory of the PC.
There are
also a number of methods that can be used to create more Workbooks.
Whichever method
we use Excel will create a new Workbook and the name (by default) will be
Book2 or the next number in the sequence. As soon as we have created our new
Workbook it will automatically become what is known as the Active Workbook.
This means the workbook in which you are currently clicked. The other
Workbook will still be open, but NOT Active! This is because there can only ever
be one Active Workbook at any one time.
To switch between
open Workbooks, go to Window on the worksheet menu bar and you will see
the names of all open Workbooks. To activate one of the other open Workbooks,
simply select its name and it will become the active workbook. Close Book2
now so that we only have one Workbook open. As mentioned above you will not be
asked if you wish to save, unless changes have been made.
Goto Next Lesson
Back to Excel Add-in, Templates and Training Main Page
|
