Datasheet
Throughout this book, we use areas made of cell addresses and ranges, which
have been given names. It’s time to get your feet wet creating a
named area.
Here’s what you do:
1. Position the mouse pointer over a cell, click and hold the left mouse
button down, and drag the pointer around.
2. Release the mouse button when done.
You’ve select an area of the worksheet.
3. Click Name a Range in the Named Cells category on the Formulas
Ribbon.
The New Name dialog box appears. Figure 1-9 shows you how it looks
so far.
4. Name the area if need be.
Excel guesses that you want to name the area with the value it finds in
the top cell of the range. That may or may not be what you want. Change
the name if you need to. In this example, we changed the name to Clients.
An alternative method to naming an area is to select it, type the name in
the Name Box (left of the Formula Bar), and press the Enter key.
5. Click the OK button.
That’s it. Hey, you’re already on your way to being an Excel pro! Now that you
have a named area, you can easily select your data at any time. Just go to the
Name Box and select it from the list. Figure 1-10 shows how we select the
Clients area we set up.
Tables work in much the same manner as named areas. Tables have a few fea-
tures that are unavailable to simple named areas. With tables you can indi-
cate that the top row contains header labels. Further, tables default to have
filtering ability. Figure 1-11 shows a table on a worksheet, with headings and
filtering ability.
Figure 1-9:
Adding a
name to the
workbook.
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Part I: Putting the Fun in Functions
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