Flexible Interactive Workbooks in Excel

Tutorial 1

Setting up the main sheet

The first thing to do when creating a Flexcel style workbook is to format the main worksheet(s) and name them. The naming is particularly important at this stage, as renaming sheets at a later stage can cause problems with macros.

To use the resource with a digital projector/interactive whiteboard it is important that the text is large enough for the students to see. Setting the format for the whole worksheet at this stage helps to organize the page later.

The following steps will work through the stages described above.

1. Name the main worksheet

   • Double click the "sheet 1" tab at the bottom of the worksheet and type in "Conversions" , then press enter. This should rename the sheet "Conversions", (fig. 1.).

2. Format the font size

   • Click the button at the top left of the worksheet, (above the "1" and to the left of the "A", to select the whole worksheet, fig. 2). Now change the font size to 16, (fig. 3.), this is the minimum size I would recomend for using with digital projectors.

3. Change the column width

   • At this stage it is worth changing the column width for all of the columns, (they can be altered again later if neccessary. To do this, with the whole sheet still selected, hover the mouse between the column headings "A" and "B",(fig. 4.), then click and drag column "A" wider. This will alter all of the column widths since the whole sheet is selected. Change the width so that only columns "A" to "F" are visible.

4. Name the settings worksheet

   • Double click the "sheet 2" tab at the bottom of the worksheet and type in "Settings" , then press enter. This should rename the sheet "Settings". you can now also delete sheet 3. To do this, right click on the tab for "sheet 3" then select delete and then ok from the warning box.

Now move on to Step 2