Navigating with Index in Excel

Are you a data analyst? Do you work on tons and tons of data with numerous amounts of sheets in your workbook?

Do you find it difficult to navigate around your workbook to get a particular piece of information due to the fact that there are 100s of sheets in your Excel workbook?

You may want to have an Index sheet which links to all other sheets within your workbook to navigate fast and to gain the relevant information within a few clicks.

Creating an Index sheet also helps to re-organize your sheets to have a convenient summary of the Workbook which you are working on for efficient data analysis.

In the Index sheet we will use Hyperlinks to link within the workbook to different sheets or even different segments of a sheet to quickly access them with a single click.

Let’s Get Started:
Suppose we have these many sheets (just for the example)

First thing to do is to create a new sheet and rename it to Index or whatever you’d like to name it.

In my case I have chosen “Index”.

Inside the Index sheet, you may design a good-looking index which clearly shows what it is meant for. 

We will be going with a simple looking index for learning purposes.

Here, I have designed a simple and to the point index to refer every sheet I have in the Workbook.

Now the Next Step is to create Hyperlinks on the cells with the Sheet names.

To do this, follow the below steps:

• Right Click on the cell with the corresponding Sheet name.

And click on Link

• A dialog box will appear,

• Click on Place in This Document present in left side of the box under Link to: section
• Under the Cell Reference select the corresponding sheet according to the cell name.

In our case it is “Sales Report” and then click on OK.

• Repeat the above step to link to every sheet in your Workbook.

Now we have linked to every sheet within the workbook. If you click on any hyperlinks you created, you’ll automatically move to the corresponding sheet.

Your worksheet will look something like this.

See, it was a fairly easy process which could save hours of your time in the near future.

If you are working on a very large workbook with 100s of sheets in it. You may require a few hours to set up the Index sheet. But, once you have created the Index sheet, your life will become much easier.

Thanks for reading. We hope you learned something valuable from this post.Keep learning!Peace.