When working in Microsoft Excel, it is probable that you will sometimes need to open more than one workbook at a time. Excel allows you to do this and to display and navigate between the workbooks.

To open several Excel documents, click on the Office button and choose “Open. Naturally, you can only open several workbooks at once if they are in the same folder. To highlight a range of workbooks, click on the name of the first, hold down the Shift key on the keyboard and click on the name of the last.

To select individual files in an arbitrary manner, hold down the Control key, click on the first, second, third, and so forth. You can also drag a selection rectangle around a series of file names to highlight several files. When you do so, make sure you begin dragging in blank space rather than starting on an item. Having highlighted the files that you wish to open, click the Open button.

Excel opens each of the selected files in a maximised window. This means that you can only see one file at a time. To switch between files you can use the Windows taskbar and choose a particular name. You can also click on the View tab of the Ribbon and here you’ll find the Switch Windows button. This contains a list of all the windows you currently have open. You can simply choose a name to activate it.

The Window section of the View tab also features an option for tiling your Windows. Just click on the Arrange All button and choose the option “Tiled”. When you click OK, Excel will all the open files into separate small windows so that you can see the contents of all files simultaneously. To activate a workbook, simply click on any part of its window.

To exit tiled mode, click on the maximise button of any of the open files. This action maximises all the open windows so when you switch windows, you will find that all of them have been maximised.

Regardless of which display mode is currently active, you can always use the keyboard to switch between the various files that you have open in Excel at any given time. To do this, hold down Control and press the Tab key.

A particularly nice feature of Excel is the ability to switch workbooks when you are in the middle of creating a formula. This allows you to create formulas with external references. For example, if you are creating a formula which uses the VLOOKUP function but the lookup table resides in a separate workbook, just make sure that both workbooks are open before you start creating the formula. At the point where you need to enter the location of the lookup table, use any of the techniques discussed above to switch workbooks and drag across the cells containing the lookup table.