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Hack 1 Create a Personal View of Your Workbooks

Excel enables you to have multiple workbooks
showing simultaneously, and to have a customized view of your
workbooks arranged in different windows. Then you can save your
view workspaces as .xlw
files and use them when it suits you.

Sometimes when working in Excel, you
might need to have more than one workbook open on your screen. This
makes it easier to use or view data from multiple workbooks. The next
few paragraphs describe how to do this in a neat and organized way.

Open all the workbooks you will need.

To open more than one workbook at a time, select File Open..., press the Ctrl key while selecting the workbooks you want to open, and then click Open.

From any of the workbooks (it
doesn't matter which one), select Window
Arrange. If "Windows of active
workbook" is checked, uncheck it, and then select
the window arrangement you prefer and click OK.

If you
select Tiled, you will be presented with your workbooks in a tiled
fashion, as shown with blank workbooks in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1. Four workbooks in a tiled view

Selecting Horizontal gives you a view
of your workbooks in a single stack, one on top of the other, as in
Figure 1-2.

Figure 1-2. Four workbooks in a horizontal view

Checking the Vertical option will place
all your open workbooks side by side, as shown in Figure 1-3.

Figure 1-3. Four workbooks in a vertical view

Finally, as shown in Figure 1-4, selecting the Cascade option will layer all
your open workbooks one on top of the other.

Figure 1-4. Four workbooks in a cascade view

Once your workbooks are displayed in your preferred view, you can
easily copy, paste, drag-and-drop, etc., between them.

If
you think you might want to return to a view you created, you can
save this preferred view as a workspace. To save a workspace, simply
select File Save Workspace, enter the
workspace's filename in the File Name box, and click
OK. When saving your workspace, the file extension will be
.xlw rather than the standard
.xls. To restore your Excel workspace to one
full window of a particular workbook, just double-click the blue
titlebar appearing on any one of your workbooks. You can also click
the Maximize button on any of the windows in your workspace. Close
your workbooks as usual when you're finished.

Whenever you need to open those same workbooks, simply open the
*.xlw file, and the view you initially set up
will be magically restored for all workbooks. If you need to open
just one of these workbooks, open the file as usual. Any changes you
make to the workbooks in the *.xlw file will be
saved automatically as you close the workspace as a whole, or you can
save workbooks individually.

If you spend a small amount of time setting up some custom views for
repetitive tasks that require multiple open workbooks,
you'll find that these tasks become easier to
manage. You might decide to use different views for different
repetitive tasks, depending on what the task is or how
you're feeling that day.