Lotus Grouped Worksheets

Prior to switching over to Excel, Lotus 1-2-3 was the spreadsheet program of choice where Bill worked. In Lotus you were able to create a "grouped worksheet." Each worksheet in a group assumed the same formatting automatically. This was extremely useful, but Bill has yet to discover the same capability in Excel. He wondered if anyone had any suggestions for this capability in Excel.

There is no way to create persistent worksheet groups in Excel. You can, however, create "on-the-fly" worksheet groups, most often referred to as a "selection set" of worksheets.

Creating such a set is simple—just select the first worksheet you want in the group, then hold down the Shift key as you click the tab for the last sheet. Now, all worksheets between the first and last are part of the selection set. You can also hold down the Ctrl key as you click on various tabs to add or remove worksheets from the group.

Once your selection set is established, then any formatting you do to one of the sheets is also done to the other sheets in the group. The only potential "gotcha" is that you need to be careful if you start entering information in cells because entering data in one sheet will also cause it to be entered in the same place in other sheets in the group.

You can also, if desired, easily copy formatting (and only formatting) from one worksheet to another. Follow these steps:

1. Format a worksheet the way you desire.
2. Select all the cells in that worksheet by pressing Ctrl+A.
3. Press Ctrl+C. This copies everything on the worksheet to the Clipboard.
4. Select the worksheet (or worksheets) to which you want to copy the formatting.
5. Press Ctrl+A. This selects all the cells on the worksheet (or worksheets).
6. Display the Home tab of the ribbon.
7. Click the down-arrow under the Paste tool and choose Paste Special from the resulting choices. Excel displays the Paste Special dialog box. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Paste Special dialog box.

8. Choose the Formats radio button.
9. Click OK.
10. If you want to also copy column widths, repeat steps 6 through 9, but instead choose the Column Widths radio button.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (11191) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007 and 2010.