Columns and Sheets and Rows (Oh My!)
This next set of explanations may constitute a bit of a generational gap, so if you don’t recognize one or more of the terms I use to explain Excel, then go ask your parents. I’m sure they know what these terms mean.
Think of Excel as a very large ledger, with an absurd number of columns and rows. How absurd, you ask? Try 16,384 columns, and 1,048,576 rows. Sounds like a lot, but there are some people (the author included) who have run out of rows before. (Don’t ask.)
Furthermore, an Excel file is called a workbook. Workbooks are like your ledger book; the book might be labeled 2012, but you’d have a page for January, and February, and so forth. The equivalent of the ledger page in Excel is a worksheet. Excel starts you out with three worksheets, and then you can add more worksheets as the necessity arises. Technically, there’s no limit to the number of worksheets you can have in a workbook, but I don’t like going into three digits.
In terms of how Excel refers to each square, or cell, in the worksheet, it uses the same notation we used with paper maps, in the dark, dreary days before Google Maps and GPS – first the column, which has a letter, like A, or B; then, the row, like 1 or 2. As you progress across the columns in Excel, you’ll see that when you get to Z, then the letters double up; AA, then AB, then AC; when you get to ZZ, then, of course, it goes to AAA, all the way over to XFD. Net result is that you have 17 billion, 179 million, 869 thousand, 184 cells per worksheet to enter your data. That ought to keep you busy for a while.
Sheet Names
When you start a new file in Excel, you get three worksheets, with the very unoriginal names Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3. The good news is, you can change these sheet names to be almost anything you want.
Why almost? There are a few things you can’t do:
- Sheet names are limited to 32 characters, including spaces
- Sheet names may not contain forward or backward slashes (/ and )
- Sheet names may not contain a question mark (?)
- Sheet names may not contain square brackets ([ and ])
I think it’s fair to say that the slashes are the biggest annoyance by far, considering how often we need to have a worksheet that references a date, like 04/30/2014. That would be handy. But since we can’t use dashes, we can use slashes, so 04/30/2014 becomes 04-30-2014. Not optimal, but what can you do?