How to Group Worksheets in Excel (Windows & Mac)
Written by co-founder Kasper Langmann, Microsoft Office Specialist.
Knowing how to group worksheets in Excel would allow you to do tasks on multiple worksheets quickly.
How does it work?
Simple. Once you group the worksheets, any changes you make on a single worksheet will reflect the same way on all the worksheets in the group at the exact same location.
That means, there’s no need for you to switch through different worksheets just to change a single typo, create standard tables, or even do the same calculations on the worksheets.
In this article, we’ll show you, step-by-step, how to group worksheets on Mac and Windows Excel. Of course, we’ll also teach you how to ungroup them. Let’s get started! 😊
How to group worksheets in Excel
First off, let’s have a sample problem:
Suppose you own a store that sells 7 items across 3 branches. For each branch, you have a separate worksheet complete with the past year’s sales.
Here are the data sets:
Now, you wanted to compute the total sales for each branch. The simplest way to do that is by using the ‘SUM’ function and adding all the values to the equation:
The computation only affected the current sheet you’re on. Grouping the worksheets would allow you to do the same computation at the same time.
To group worksheets in Excel, hold down ‘Ctrl’ (‘Command’ for Mac) and click the tabs you want to group.
You’ll know when the worksheets are selected and grouped when the color of the tab turns from gray to white:
Once the worksheets are grouped, you can now do the computation that would reflect on all the worksheets.
Let’s do the ‘SUM’ computation again and see how it affects all the worksheets:
Group All Worksheets
If want to group all the worksheets, you can simply right-click on a single tab and choose ‘Select All Sheets’ from the options:
How to ungroup worksheets
Ungrouping the worksheets is even simplier.
One way to do that is by clicking the next worksheet tab.
If you don’t like to go to another worksheet just to ungroup them, you can also right-click on your current worksheet tab and choose ‘Ungroup Sheets’ from the option:
Ungroup Selected Worksheets
What if you need to ungroup selected worksheets only?
To do that, just click on the worksheet tab you want to ungroup while holding down ‘Ctrl’ (‘Command’ for Mac).
Take note, you can’t ungroup the worksheet tab you’re currently on.
Wrapping things up…
Grouping worksheets save time. Gone are the days when you have to manually do the same exact thing on different worksheets on the same exact location.
If you’re having difficulty doing it, feel free to practice on the sample file we included. 😊