Microsoft Office

Part I
Getting Started with Excel
You can select a noncontiguous range in several ways:
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NOTE
Select the first range (or cell). Then press Ctrl as you click and drag the mouse to highlight additional
cells or ranges.
From the keyboard, select a range as described previously (using F8 or the Shift key). Then press
Shift+F8 to select another range without canceling the previous range selections.
Enter the range (or cell) address in the Name box and press Enter. Separate each range address
with a comma.
Choose Home ➪ Editing ➪ Find & Select ➪ Go To (or press F5) to display the Go To dialog box.
Enter the range (or cell) address in the Reference box and separate each range address with a
comma. Click OK, and Excel selects the ranges.
Noncontiguous ranges differ from contiguous ranges in several important ways. One obvious
difference is that you can’t use drag-and-drop methods to move or copy noncontiguous ranges.
Selecting multisheet ranges
In addition to two-dimensional ranges on a single worksheet, ranges can extend across multiple worksheets
to be three-dimensional ranges.
Suppose that you have a workbook set up to track budgets. A common approach is to use a separate worksheet
for each department, making it easy to organize the data. You can click a sheet tab to view the information
for a particular department.
Figure 5.3 shows a simplified example. The workbook has four sheets, named Totals, Marketing,
Operations, and Manufacturing. The sheets are laid out identically. The only difference is the values. The
Totals sheet contains formulas that compute the sum of the corresponding items in the three departmental
worksheets.
FIGURE 5.3
The worksheets in this workbook are laid out identically.
ON the CD-ROM
This workbook, named budget.xlsx, is available on the companion CD-ROM.
Assume that you want to apply formatting to the sheets — for example, make the column headings bold
with background shading. One (not so efficient) approach is simply to format the cells in each worksheet
separately. A better technique is to select a multisheet range and format the cells in all the sheets simultaneously.
The following is a step-by-step example of multisheet formatting, using the workbook shown in
Figure 5.3.
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