Each Excel document is referred to as a workbook and each workbook can contain up to 255 worksheets. To navigate to a particular worksheet, click on one of the sheet tabs displayed at the bottom of your screen.
To the left of the tabs will find four navigation icons. These are very useful where you have a workbook that either contains lots of worksheets or has worksheets with very long names. The very first button makes the name of the first worksheet visible; the very last button makes the name of the last worksheet visible. The left pointing arrow button makes the name of the previous worksheet visible and of course the right pointing arrow button makes the name of the next worksheet visible. These four buttons don’t actually activate a worksheet; they simply make its tab visible. To activate a worksheet, you still have to click on that particular name tab.
Worksheets can also be activated using the keyboard. To activate the next worksheet to the right, hold down Control and press the Page Down key. This moves you forward through the worksheets are naturally holding Control and pressing Page Up moves you back to the left.
Once you have navigated to a particular worksheet, you will need to go to a particular cell or a particular section of that worksheet. Firstly, you can use the scrollbars to make different parts of the worksheet visible. Secondly, you can move around the worksheet using the arrows on your keyboard: down, right, up and left.
Excel also has some useful keyboard shortcuts for moving to the edges of a given body of data. To get to the right-most cell of your current range, hold down the Control key and press the right arrow key and of course to get to the bottom cell, hold down Control and press the down arrow.
It’s also possible to do exactly the same thing using the mouse. Position the cursor on one of the edges of the selection rectangle (the bold highlight which is displayed around the currently active cell) and then simply double-click. Double-clicking on the right hand edge of the selection rectangle moves you to the extreme right of the current range. Double-clicking on the bottom edge moves the cursor to the bottom of the range, and so forth.
There are two final navigation keyboard shortcuts which should be mentioned: Control-Home and Control-End. Hold down the Control key and press End to move to the bottom right of the current range. Hold down Control and press Home to move to the top left of the current range.
As well as navigating through worksheets, most Excel users make frequent use of the Ribbon. Excel offers a series of handy keyboard shortcuts when working with the Ribbon.
To access Ribbon keyboard shortcuts simply press the Alt key once. A series of numbers and letters is then displayed. These represent the shortcuts that you should type to activate that part of the Ribbon. For example, “W” is the shortcut key for activating the View Tab.
When you press “W”, the View Tab is activated and another series of badges is displayed on each of the commands within the View Tab. For example, the “Arrange All” command uses “A” as its keyboard shortcut, so simply typing “A” is equivalent to clicking the Arrange All button.
Once you have typed a letter to execute a command, the Ribbon loses focus and the shortcut letters and numbers disappear. To access Ribbon commands via the keyboard again, just press the Alt Key and the badges will reappear. This means that you never have to worry about learning keyboard shortcuts. All you have to remember is to press the Alt key on your keyboard and Excel will prompt you from then on.
Author is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007 Classes at their central London training centre.