Level 2, Section 2 - Format worksheets and workbooks

1. Changing worksheet tab colour

Hello, and welcome to level two, session two. I'm using a particular workbook, which is included in the resources for this video. It's the same workbook that we used in the previous session, but I'm including it as a resource just in case you skipped all the way to this particular video. Right, I've got three worksheet tabs down here, and I can change the default colour to something a bit more interesting by clicking and going to tab colour and then selecting the colour I want. So I could have a blue colour here and a green colour here, and that sort of thing.

And I'm not just limited to these 48 standard colors. I think there are more like 70 colours there. But you can click on more colors, and you get the colour wheel. Now, this colour wheel is a two-part dialogue box. You have a more extensive range of standard colours here, which start off white and go to different colours in every direction. Or you can click on Custom, and thisallows you to pick virtually any color. It's limited to around 16 million colors, but quite frankly, your eye can't see that many colours, so it's virtually any color. And you can hover over a colour to see what it would look like. And you can change the intensity. Or you can use the red, green, and blue bars to go from zero to 255.

So if I add a bit more red, you can see the colour develop gradually. Now it's changing more, getting more pink. So whichever the way you want towork with is fine by me. So you can pick a standard color or you can pick a variation of colours that are here. But this leads to the question: why would you want to colour your spreadsheets? What's the point of that? Well, different people all have different ideas. Here's my idea of working: I use a huge number of spreadsheets in my workbooks, some of them in one particular workbook. I may have 100 or 200 spreadsheets, and it's easy to get confused as to where you are. So I have a particular colour for the original data.

So any of my spreadsheets that have original data have a greenish color. And then maybe I will have a report. Well, I have my report pages, just generally without color. But there may be section headings in Section 1, Section 2, and Section 3. So I put these as a blue color, and so Ican navigate through all of these tabs and go, oh, there'sa section two, and it's probably called section two, but it'sprobably quite useful if it's in a blue color. So that's how my eye is instantly drawn to it. And I might have another colour for charts, let's say graphs. So I could go, "Oh, this is a chart that contains a pie chart, or this one contains data." This is a divider, however useful. You use these colors. It is actually quite useful in a big spreadsheet to have a constant system. So whatever works for you So this is how to add colours to tabs, and perhaps more importantly, why?

2. Inserting and deleting columns and rows

Now I've got an existing spreadsheet here, and I might want to say I want to insert a new row or I need to insert a new column. Maybe I want something in between file extensions and attributes. No problem. What I need to do is go to Insert Cells. So on the home page, I can go to Cells Insert. And here you can see that I can insert a single cell.

If I highlight a column by clicking on the letter name of the column, then I can insert a column. And if I highlight a row, I can insert a row. So here we go. Click on a column to insert it, click on a cell to insert sheet rows, and rows and columns are inserted. Now everything gets pushed down. So row eleven becomes row twelve. Row twelve becomes row 13 and so forth. So we're inserting, but it's not in the insert menu because it's so common that the designers have put it in the home menu. Now if you wanted to delete the columns, then you've got this delete drop down box so I can delete rows. So raw 12 becomes 1113 becomes 12, and anything that was in the raw gets removed. And similarly, I can delete a column. So column F becomes column e, column G becomes column H, and so forth. The fact that data can change what's written means that it's very dangerous to talk to somebody about it. Did you see that thing on row 14? Because by then, if it's two weeks later, row 14 might no longer be in row 14.

So I generally use an ID column, so I can say ID number 21. And then it doesn't matter whether it happens to be on row nine or row ten. Now suppose I wanted to highlight three columns. So, say I wanted three columns between D and E. Well, I highlighted "e" and I'm still clicking the mouse button, if not unclicking it yet. And I scroll across so that three columns are highlighted. And now I release the mouse button, and now I can go to insert, which is part of the home. So home insert, insert sheet columns, and I can do the same thing with rows: highlight three rows, go to insert sheet rows, and it's the same for deleting. I can highlight the columns and go to "delete." Now there is another way of inserting and deleting cells, and that is by clicking where you are. So I've just highlighted e, f, and g. I'm going to click right, and I've got delete. Now it's not telling me that these are deleting columns. You've just got to work that out for yourself. So if I click "delete," it will delete the three columns. And similarly for the raws, I can right-click and click delete, and that deletes those three rows. So the multiple ways of being able to insert or delete individual rows—whichever works for you—are the ones that you should use.

Now, you can also insert or delete sheets, but that can be done easily enough by clicking on the plus button at the bottom, left or right, and then clicking and going to delete or insert. Now you can be a bit more flexible, and you can insert additional cells without inserting additional rows or columns. So suppose I want to insert a new cell here in B-5. Well, if I go to insert cells, it tells me, OK, you want to insert a cell, but what do you want me to do? Do you want me to insert a cell in B 5 in B 6 and move all of the other cells down? So B six becomes B seven, and B seven becomes B eight. Do you want me to shift all of the cells across so B-6 becomes C-6, C-6 becomes D-6, and so forth? Or do you want me to insert an entire row or an entire column? And again, you can get this using the right-click context menu. So there is a bit of a danger in inserting an individual cell because, remember, I said I like to look at individual IDs. So ID 18 is this piece, Ras Los Aliba. If I were to insert a new cell and shift the initial cells down, the existing cells would also shift down, and ID 18 would no longer be rasalobe libra; it would now be ID 19. So use with caution. If you are adding data to an existing spreadsheet, you may be better off inserting a row or inserting a column instead of just inserting individual cells.

3. Undo and Redo

Now, if you delete raws that have existing data or columns that have existing data, you can't just insert a new raw and expect a date to come back. It's gone. However, you can use the undo function (undo or CTRL and Z), which is the closest letter on my keyboard to the control key is the undo.It's my fault; I've made a mistake. Help me. And you'll also see it up here as well. It's so common. This is the quick access toolbar, which we'll get to later. And it's such a common feature that Microsoft wants you to be able to see it all the time. So clicking on "do my insertion of a row," then clicking "do again," undoes my deletion of a row. So we've got our data pack.

So it's very handy, and, oh my goodness, I've just done something wrong. And similarly, this is the undo button. What this? Does it recover what you have done? So, let's take an example. I'm going to type the phrase "hello." My name is Fred. So hello My name is Fred. Oh dear. I want to insert a new column and put in the word "name." Okay, so I'll insert it in the column, and I'll put in the word name. If I undo this, I will get rid of my typing in the word "name." So there goes my insertion. If I undo again, I will have uninsured the additional row. Now, if I want to say that the undo was a mistake and I want to redo it, I will click the redo button. So now I've reinserted the column, and now I've reinserted the name, the word name. So undo is getting rid of the last action you've done, and redo is getting rid of the undo that you've just done. Now there is a dropdown next to "undo" and a dropdown next to "redo. This shows me a list of actions that I have taken, and I can undo not just the latest action but the latest two actions or the latest three actions. And you'll see at the bottom that it says to undo 32 actions at the moment.

So it really keeps a good memory. So if I undo the last five actions, it will undo my typing of "Fred is my" and inserting a column. So I just get the word "hello." Now I can redo this, and here are these five actions that I can redo. So I'm just going to undo one particular action. So I've got hello. My name is Fred. And what I've done is take the word "name" and just undo it. Now I can undo it and put the nameword back at the moment I have undone it. So it's. Hello. My name is Fred. Now, suppose I were to put a period at the end, a full stop. I can't anymore redo my action. So I can no longer get the computer to put in the word "name." So as soon as you have done something new, the redo list clears. So there's no way I'm going to be able to go back and get the computer to put in a name, because as soon as I undo an action, that's the action it thinks you want me to undo when I click redo. So in other words, if you want to undo something that you've just undone, you need to do it immediately. If you start doing something else in Excel, the undo list gets wiped. So undone is my hope. I've just done something wrong, and it's controlled and said, and there's also a redo that is controlled, which is why the letter just before said undo.

4. File Management tips

So Now, for this reason—that the redo gets wiped—it's for me a good idea to keep backups. Now, you may remember a little while ago that I suggested that when you save an item, a spreadsheet, or a workbook, you save it with today's date. So, if today's date is January 1, 2020, then I would put 20 or 1 or 1, or if it's January 2020, the second 20 or 1 or 2 year month date, and then I would keep on editing. But suppose I made a mistake later on and wanted to go back to this version. Well, if I kept saving all the way through the day, I couldn't go back to an earlier version during this particular day. In fact, there is a way, but I'll show you that a little bit later.

So what do I do? I work it out, okay. When is the time that it would cause me the most amount of annoyance to have to redo my work? And I reckon it's around 2 hours. So after about 2 hours, I'm going to file savers, and it's still the same day, still January 2, 2020. But now I'm going to put two after it, and then I'm going to work for another couple of hours, and then I'm going to save it as three. Why do I do this? Why do I create all of these different-named spreadsheets? The reason is what happens if I accidentally save it at 09:00 in the morning, and accidentally at 10:00, I delete this row, and I then save two at 11:00 and three at 01:00.

And then I suddenly realized, "Oh my goodness, at 10:00 I deleted this row; I need to get it back." Well, then I would open up the original from January 20, which still has this raw file that I accidentally deleted. I'm very big in terms of keeping multiple versions of spreadsheets so that as you develop them over time, you can go backwards to almost undo a problem that occurred because, for instance, the spreadsheet got corrupted and you can't open it. And this happens with some of my larger spreadsheets from time to time; it just refuses to load. And you think, "Ah, I lost all of this work." But if you saved it and put in today's date and put in 2, 3, 4, you'll only have lost about 2 hours. And every time I save it, I think, "Oh my goodness," what would happen if I lost the work I just put in? I just incremented the number. So sometimes I go up to 1112, and that's fine because spreadsheets are really small, so you can keep multiple backups without your hard drive becoming full. Now, what I also do then is create an "old" folder because obviously there are now a lot of spreadsheets.

And so I noticed incidentally that it is now in alphabetical order and it's in date order because that's the way the Japanese system works; the dates become the right order if I were to save it with tomorrow's date, the 3 January, which would come at the bottom of the list. If I were to save it for next month's date. So 2020, or two or one, would still come at the bottom of the list if I were to save you with next year's date. So whether it's 2021 or 101, it's still at the bottom of the list. So what I do is drag older versions into the old folder, and then I'm just left with one version in my folder, but I can always go back to earlier versions if I remember which ones I saw. So I can go back in time, but it's not cluttering up my main folder. So file management is important. When you start inserting and deleting columns, you might accidentally delete something important and want to go back in time. So make sure that if the worst happens, you are able to rectify your mistakes. So the first thing you should use is the undo button. But if you've got good file management, you'll be able to go back in time and retrieve something from several hours ago.

Prepared by Top Experts, the top IT Trainers ensure that when it comes to your IT exam prep and you can count on ExamSnap Microsoft Excel (Excel and Excel 2019) certification video training course that goes in line with the corresponding Microsoft MO-200 exam dumps, study guide, and practice test questions & answers.