Creating a new Workbook

Creating a New Workbook

1. Each time you start Excel, it opens offering you the option to start a new, blank workbook or begin with a template.

2. So, if you're about to start Excel and create a new workbook, you can accomplish both tasks in one step—just fire up Excel from your Start menu, desktop icon, or a button on your taskbar, and then click the Blank Workbook button shown here.

3. You can also click the File Tab and choose New from the menu if you’re already in Excel. This presents you with options for starting with a blank workbook or using a template as the basis of your new workbook.

4. If you're already in Excel and using an existing workbook and now you want to create a new one, just press CTRL + N (as in "New")—and with the keyboard shortcut, you'll get a new, blank workbook, no questions asked. Note that the workbook number increments by 1 for each new workbook added in a given session, so now this is Book 2.

5. Returning to your New workbook options on the File tab, when it comes to templates, Microsoft builds in a lot of them for us, to give us a head start on setting up our workbooks and the sheets within them.
6. The template names are usually a pretty good indication of what you can expect to find, but it's worth it to check them out beforehand to make sure the built-in content is what you'll need. You'll always need to add and remove things, of course—and to rename and reformat things to suit your exact needs, but templates can be a helpful jump-start to the process of setting up a new workbook.

7. If I choose the Business category here, we can look at Simple Invoice, and after a quick download, you'll see the basic setup Excel provides—which includes instructional text boxes you can later remove.

8. Now, once the workbook is made, whether you're starting with a blank or from a template, the best thing to do is Save it. And yes, I mean that—save it now, before you've done anything, so that all you have to do as you start and continue working, is choose Save from the File tab, click the Save button on the Quick Access toolbar, or press CTRL + S whenever you've done anything you'd rather not have to redo if your file were to close unexpectedly.

9. So having switched back to the blank workbook, we'll Save this as Sales Report, and then we can get started working.
10. You can change your save location by clicking More Options, and then Browse – to get to the classic Save As dialog box, where I can choose where to save my file.

11. Once it's saved, you can begin adding worksheets, naming them, and of course, populating the worksheets with your information. You can learn more about how to do all of those things in our other videos.

12. And again, as you work along, be sure to save frequently, to make sure you won’t lose your work.
    
    I recommend the keyboard shortcut, CTRL + S, because it’s quick and easy – and you’re more likely to press those keys and just keep working, rather than stopping to click the file tab or a button on a toolbar.