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ExcelUser Instructions:

Appendix: How to Do Group Editing
In Your Excel Dashboard Reports

In Excel, you can change several worksheets at the same time. Here's how to use this
feature to save a lot of time when you work with Excel dashboard reports.

by Charley Kyd

When you look at the sheet tabs in your report workbook, you'll typically see two colors, gray and yellow.

I assigned the yellow colors to the charts' FDS (Figure Data Support) tabs because the colors tell me that these sheets allow me to use group editing. So what's group editing?

In Excel, you can select multiple sheets by selecting their tabs much as you select cells in a worksheet. That is:

• Select one sheet by clicking on its tab.
• Select a continuous group of sheets by holding down your Shift key and then clicking on the tab that's at the end of the group you want to select.
• Select specific sheets by holding down your Ctrl key and then clicking on the sheets you want to add to your group of sheets.
• To deselect the group, click on a sheet that's not in the group. Or, if all sheets in the workbook are selected, click on a tab of any sheet that's not the active sheet.

When more than one sheet is selected, Excel adds the text "[Group]" after the name of your workbook at the very top of your Excel window.

The reason you will want to select a group of worksheets is that when you change one of the sheets in a group you also change every other sheet in the group at the same time. This can save you many hours of work!

Warning! Remember to deselect the group immediately after you've made the changes you intend. Otherwise, changes you want to make only to one sheet will be applied to all sheets in the group.

The reason I assigned a different color to the tabs in the report workbook is that the color tells me which worksheets allow me to edit them as a group.

To see why you can edit them as a group, start with sheet D, then move to sheet E, and F, and so on. Notice that although the data varies from sheet to sheet, the structure of each sheet is identical. Actual data always begins in row 17. Chart data always begins in row 45. And so on.

The formulas are the same as well. The formula in cell B10 is identical in all worksheets with the yellow tab.

Therefore, if you need to change the structure, the formulas, or the formatting in one of the chart FDS sheets, you should select the entire group of sheets and make the same changes to them all.

I've explained group editing because it applies to the following changes you might want to make to your reports.