Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Excel in Microsoft 365. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Returning a Worksheet Name.

Returning a Worksheet Name

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated September 17, 2022)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Excel in Microsoft 365


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Looking for a way to put the name of your worksheet directly into a cell? Excel makes this easy through the use of the CELL function. If you include the following in a cell, Excel returns the full path of the workbook, along with the sheet name:

=CELL("filename")

For instance, if you entered this into a cell in the Sheet1 worksheet of the MyWB workbook, the information returned by Excel might be something like C:\My Documents\[MyWB.xls]Sheet1 (depending, of course, on the drive and directory in which the workbook is saved).

I should also note that if you have not saved the workbook yet, the CELL function returns a #VALUE error. This is because there is no filename to actually return until such point as you save.

To return just the worksheet name from this value, you could use the following in your cell:

=MID(CELL("filename",A1),(FIND("]",CELL("filename",A1))+1),50)

This will work for any worksheet name up to 50 characters in length. (If you routinely use different lengths, simply change the value in the formula.) Continuing the earlier example, Excel would return Sheet1 as the result.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (11766) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Excel in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Returning a Worksheet Name.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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What is two minus 0?

2022-09-19 01:38:38

Michael van der Riet

A client has a very small payroll -- 3 weekly paid -- and I do the payslips on Excel. For each employee I copy the last payslip and rename that tab in the format "AA yymmdd" where AA is the employee's initials. Sometimes I forget to change the date on the payslip as well. Your tip has inspired me to do something about this.

=DATEVALUE(LET(ThisDate,RIGHT(CELL("filename"),6),TEXTJOIN("/",FALSE,RIGHT(ThisDate,2),MID(ThisDate,3,2),LEFT(ThisDate,2))))


2022-09-17 10:55:16

J. Woolley

https://excelribbon.tips.net/T011766_Returning_a_Worksheet_Name.html

My Excel Toolbox includes the following function to return information about Target (a cell or range); default Target is the formula's cell:
=NameOf([This],[Target])
The first parameter This can be "sheet" (or "worksheet"), "book" (or "workbook"), "path" (or "filepath"), "app" (or "application"), "caption" (or "titlebar"), "statusbar", "user", "organization", "printer", "computer", "?" (or "help"), or the name of an environment variable (like "TEMP"). Default value is "sheet" (or "worksheet"); with "book" (or "workbook"), the filename is returned without its path.
This function is similar to Excel's CELL and INFO functions, but perhaps more useful.
See https://sites.google.com/view/MyExcelToolbox/


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