We seriously enjoy working on a computer, but to work more efficiently is an even greater joy! A trick you may not have added to your list of efficient tricks is the duplication of previously developed work. You may have spent hours pouring over an Excel project until you had it just right. Later, you may find yourself in need of a very similar project. Consider how effecient it would be to copy the original work and make slight changes to have the new project completed!
Let's see how Excel lets you copy work from one project to another.
In this example, an elementary teacher is keeping a gradebook project on her class. She has a separate gradebook for each subject she teaches. Consider this spreadsheet the first project she develops.
She has labeled the gradebook mathematics, formatted the column headings, carefully built and checked the formulas/functions to compute her grades, entered the names of the students and alphabetized them. Now she needs to repeat all that work for each of the subjects she teaches. Fortunately, she remembers how to make Excel work efficiently for her.
She
loads her mathematics gradebook into Excel and then opens a new document
by selecting File + New.
In this example, we will build entirely different spreadsheet documents rather than try to keep all of her work in a single gradebook. Not a better idea, just one the teacher prefers.
Now she has a brand new spreadsheet. The title is Book1 until she saves it.
Now,
she goes back to the Mathematics document. This is accomplished by clicking
on the Window and selecting the open document Mathematics.xls.
Note the checkmark beside Book 1. This means that this is the document currently being viewed.
This will bring back the Mathematics document. We want to copy ALL of the gradebook. To do this, she will click in the cell block above the row numbers and to the left of the column letters. This will select all cells. She then copies the selected cells to the clipboard (Control + C or Edit + Copy from the Menu or click on the copy button in the button panels - whichever she prefers).
After the information is copied to the Clipboard, she will return to the blank spreadsheet labeled Book 1.
Again,
note that Mathematics.xls has the checkmark indicating this is the document
open for view.
She highlights Book 1 and selectes it with a click.
She selects Cell A1 to indicate where the document should begin when she pastes. Then she will execute a Paste command.
Note
she has returned to Book1.
Note the label has to be changed (by the teacher) from Mathematics to Science.
The new Science gradebook will have all of the students' names in order and the column headings and formulas/functions from her Mathematics gradebook.
She has to save the work by selecting File and giving the new document a good file name, like Science.
She could save a little effort by performing the duplication process BEFORE she begins to enter grades!
This process illustrates how she copied one document to another. Remember to look under the Window in the Menu to access other open Excel documents. Before leaving, we should point out that the duplication process is very similar should the teacher have wished to keep all of the grades in a single document. She would have selected a different sheet from the sheet tabs at the bottom of the Mathematics document.
(If you are not comfortable with Sheets, you might review the Sheets tutorial back on the Main Menu for Excel topics under Useful Organizational Features.