Workspaces in Excel

Do you find that you often have a need to work on two Excel files at one time? Are you opening both files every time you do it?  Well, you don’t have to.  You can save the files as a “Workspace” and they will open together every time you want to use them.

Here’s what you do:

Open Excel and open one file.  Now, with that file open, Open the second file.  Go to the Window menu and select “Arrange”, then choose “Tile”.  You see both of your spreadsheets open side by side.

This is real convenient for dragging and dropping or copying and pasting information from one to the other.  It is also an easy way to compare the data in one to the other.

Now comes the cool part.  Go to the File menu and choose “Save Workspace”.

You will see the Save Workspace dialog box come up. Name your file (see it is being saved with an .xlw extension instead of the usual .xls extension given to Excel files) and save it in the same location where the original two files are located.

Now, whenever you want to work on these two files together, you can just open up your .xlw file and they will both open side by side.

And the really great thing is you still have the individual files so you can work on them separately any time you want and the changes made in the individual files OR from within the workspace file will be made to both.