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

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

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

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

The Window section of the View tab also contains an option for tiling your Windows. Just click on the Arrange All button and choose Tiled. When you click OK, Excel arranges all the open files into separate small windows so that you can see the contents of all files simultaneously. To activate any document, 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 window display mode is currently active, you can 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 on your keyboard.

A particularly useful feature of Excel is the ability to switch windows when you are in the middle of creating a formula. This makes it easy to create formulas with external references. For example, if you are creating a formula containing the VLOOKUP function but the lookup table resides in a separate workbook, just make sure that both workbooks are open before you begin creating the formula. At the point where you need to specify 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.