Excel allows you to change the order of worksheets within a workbook at any time. There are two ways of achieving this, the first of which is simply to drag the tabs representing each worksheet left or right. As well dragging individual tabs, it is also possible to highlight several tabs and drag them all at the same time.

As well as moving worksheets around within the same workbook, it is also possible to move sheets from one workbook to another. For example, let’s say we have a workbook containing a worksheet for each month of the year (“Jan”, “Feb”, etc.) and that we now want to split this into four smaller workbooks, one for each quarter: the first for “Jan”, “Feb” and “Mar”; the second for “Apr”, “May” and “Jun”; and so forth.

To keep the number of sheets in each workbook to a minimum, we could begin by changing the default number of worksheets Excel will give us in each new workbook. This is done by clicking on the Office Button and choosing Excel Options. In the section headed “When creating new workbooks Include This Many Sheets”, we alter the number to one. We can then generate our four worksheets by clicking four times on the new sheet icon on the Quick Access Toolbar.

Each of the new workbooks will have one sheet, which is the minimum that Excel will allow. We can access the new workbooks by clicking on the View Tab of the Ribbon and using the Switch Windows drop-down menu. To move worksheets between workbooks using drag and drop, we will need to see all the workbooks simultaneously. Excel has a special command for achieving this. In the View Tab, we click on the Arrange All button and choose “Tiled”. Excel will then display each of the workbooks in a smaller window, allowing us to see all of the open workbooks simultaneously.

The next step is to highlight the three worksheets relating to the first quarter: we click on “Jan” (the first), hold down the Shift key and click on “Mar” (the last). We can then drag the selected sheets across to the window of one of our new workbooks. We can the simply repeat this procedure for the three remaining quarters.

As was mentioned earlier, the minimum number of sheets which you can have in a workbook is one. Therefore, when we have moved the final three sheets, the window of the original workbook will simply disappear. Naturally though, the last saved version of the document will still exist.

The final step would be to delete the unwanted sheet from each of the four new workbooks. Having done this, to leave the split screen view and return to normal mode, we simply maximise any of the windows.

As a matter of interest, the second way of copying sheets from one workbook to another is to use the Move or Copy Sheets command. This is available in the Format drop-down menu in the Cells section of the Home Tab or by right-clicking on the selected sheet tabs. As the name implies, as well is moving sheets, this method allows you to create a copy at another location.