How to move and copy worksheets to other workbooks

In this lesson, we'll look at how to move and copy worksheets to other workbooks.

Let's take a look.

If you'd like to move or copy a worksheet from the current workbook into a brand new workbook, just right-click the worksheet tab you'd like to move and choose "Move or Copy" from the menu.

Then, in the Move or Copy dialog box, switch the dropdown selector to (new book). Until you're really comfortable with moving worksheets, it's a good idea to check the "Create a copy" checkbox.

When you click OK, a copy of the worksheet is placed into a new workbook, and the original worksheet remains in the current workbook.

If you don't check "Create a copy" the original will be removed from the current workbook, so be careful with this option. Checking "Create a copy" is safer because you can always delete the original after you've verified that the worksheet is safe in a new location.

Let's close the new workbook now and look at copying or moving a worksheet into another existing workbook. Before you can move a worksheet to another workbook, you'll need to open that workbook in Excel. In this case, we already have two workbooks open: one called "Move copy source" with four color tabs and one called "Move copy destination" with just a single worksheet.

Let's copy the Red worksheet from the source workbook to the destination workbook. As before, right-click the worksheet tab and choose "Move or copy." Then, choose the existing worksheet from the dropdown, and select a location. We'll select move to end, and check "Create a copy."

When you click OK, a copy of the worksheet will appear in the destination workbook.

Using the Control key, you can select and work with more than one sheet at a time. Let's move Blue, Green, and Purple sheets into the destination workbook. First, we control-click to select all three sheets. Then, right-click a tab as before.

This time we won't check the "Create a copy" checkbox.

The Blue, Green, and Purple sheets have now been moved to the destination workbook and no longer exist in the source workbook.