Excel spreadsheets usually start small, but they can turn into real monsters. Making a personal budget seems simple enough; but if you end up itemizing everything you buy, reconciling all of your books precisely, and making charts to visualize the rate that you’re paying off debt, the whole thing can become surprisingly complex. And that’s just one person. Organizations can end up with spreadsheets with tens or hundreds of pages.
Managing a sprawling spreadsheet is difficult, but one way of saving some time is by grouping sheets. The grouping lets you automatically reproduce formatting on one page of a spreadsheet on all other pages. For example, let’s say that I want to run a monthly budget over the course of a year. I could make a spreadsheet with twelve pages, and then group them to reproduce the formatting. I’d only have to format one page to format every month for the entire year.
There are two ways edit pages as a group. If you want to edit every page you have open, you can right-click on any Sheet tab and then click Select All Pages. All of the page tabs should be highlighted in white to indicate they’re being edited together. Alternatively, you can pick out select sheets by clicking on them while having the Ctrl keyboard button pressed. In either case, you should see the [Group] text now appear in the sheet’s name on the title bar.
