When you’re using Open Office to manage your spreadsheets using the Calc software, one thing you might want to do is store multiple types of information that you can split up, but don’t want to use multiple files for it. This is a common request – in an expense report for example, you may want a spreadsheet for your revenues, one for your costs and then multiple others for other financial data. Having these in separate files just isn’t practical at all, so in this article we’re going to be telling you about the sheets feature which will solve this problem and make it easier for you.
Although you may not even know it, whenever you create a new spreadsheet multiple sheets are created for you automatically. A sheet is like a fresh spreadsheet, the entire contents of it are blank and you can use it like a new one. There are a couple of differences, though. It’s still classed as the same spreadsheet so you can easily interchange between them if you need to, which is why we recommend that you use this for multiple different relevant pieces of storage. You can also reference other sheets when you’re writing formulas for your spreadsheet as well which can prove to be very helpful.
Now that you know what a sheet is, we’ll tell you about how you can change between them. This is incredibly simple. Depending on the version of the office suite you’re using, you should see near the bottom (or near the top) of the Calc window an area where there’s different tabs. By default, a spreadsheet will have “Sheet 1″, “Sheet 2″ and “Sheet 3″. All you need to do is click each one to change to a new sheet, everything you type will be saved just like normal. Be aware that you can change the names of sheets so that they’re a lot clearer for the people who use it, this may be a good idea if you’re using many of them all in the same spreadsheet.
Three sheets in a spreadsheet may be enough in a lot of cases, but what happens if you need more? How exactly can you create more? There are two different ways you can do this. There’s a small button just after the list of sheets that you can press which will automatically create a new one for you. If you’d like another way, you can right click on any of the sheet tabs and then click “Insert Sheet”. Both will have the same effect and will allow you to create new ones. Note that you can have as many sheets as you want in an document but it’s a good idea to try and keep it down if possible so that it doesn’t get too difficult to manage.
In conclusion, using sheets in the Calc tool is actually surprisingly easy. You can make things clearer for yourself by splitting your information and data up into different sections, and all it takes is a couple of clicks to do so. To create a sheet, just press 1 button after the list of sheets and you’ll be able to interchange between them instantly, it can’t get much simpler than that. We highly recommend that you install it onto your computer now if you want to take advantage of this very simple but powerful feature that you’re bound to use regularly.