Copy a worksheet - Excel 2007

I work with monthly worksheets and they develop over the month in such a way that I want the starting point for the next month to be where this month stops. So, I need to copy this month's worksheet to make next month's.

In Excel this is simple. Right click the tab at the foot of the worksheet and choose Move or Copy sheet. Make sure you click the Create a Copy checkbox so you make a copy or you're toast - you'll lose your original.

Now choose the position in the current workbook to make the copy or choose another or new workbook. Click OK and the copy is made.

I then strip out all of last month's variable data and start over for this month... but I always make sure I made a copy before I do this, you never can be too sure.

Excel 2007: quick format your data

I earlier versions of Excel there were some pretty horrid autoformats you could use to quickly format your tables. These are gone from Excel 2007 - thankfully!

Instead, Excel 2007 offers sophisticated formatting options, but they can be applied only if you're prepared to convert your range to a table. However, this isn't always a desirable outcome but luckily there is a work around.

Start by selecting your data and click Home tab > Format as Table and select a table format. You will notice that Excel applies an AutoFilter to your data which is typically the most obvious part of the conversion that you don't want. Other things come with this table format too - if you have data alongside the table – but not part of it - and you delete a row from a table or insert a row into a table, the data alongside remains in place.

So, if you want to retain the nice formatting but not the table behaviour, click in the table and choose Table Tools > Design tab and click the Convert to Range option and click Yes when prompted to convert the table to a normal range. The range will go back to behaving like a typical Excel range and the formatting will be retained.

Excel: Open multiple workbooks

If you're like me, you will open Excel in the morning and then open a series of workbooks that you work on each day. You can save time in finding and loading these files by creating an Excel Workspace.

To do this, open all the workbooks you want to have opened each time you launch Excel and then save them as a Workspace file by choosing File > Save Workspace and type a name for the file. Click Save and you can then open all the workbooks at one time by opening the Workspace file. Of course, if you just want to open a single file you can open it as normal.

In Excel 2007 - find the Workspace feature by choosing View > Window > Save Workspace.

Another alternative for opening files automatically when Excel opens is to save the file to the XLStart folder - when you do this, the file is opened every time Excel launches.