Feel Tips - Copy or Move Excel Worksheet from One Workbook to Another

What will you do if you have to copy or move a worksheet data from one workbook to another? It sounds like a complicated job. In truth, we can easily copy the whole Excel worksheet and paste into another workbook. Excel has a built-in feature that makes quick work of this task, but as usual, there’s more than one way to get the job done in Excel.

Solution 1 Copy or Move Worksheet via Excel User Interface

First, open both the source and the target workbook. Go to the source workbook and navigate the worksheet which we want to copy or move. Then, click Home tab and then click the Format dropdown in the Cells group. Select “Move or Copy Sheet” in the Organize Sheets section as the image shows in the below. In edition 2003, we can select “Move or Copy Sheet” from Edit menu. 

Now, in the “Move or Copy Sheet” dialog, select the target sheet from the To Book dropdown. Excel will display only the open workbooks in this list. Here we can also update the Before Sheet selection.

If we want to copy rather than move the worksheet, click the Create a copy option at the bottom of the dialog. Click OK and Excel will copy or move the worksheet to the target workbook.

Solution 2 Copy or Move Worksheet via View Menu

First, open both the source and target workbooks. Then, follow the simple 2 steps below:

1. Go to the View tab and choose View Side By Side in the Window group. Excel will split the screen, horizontally, between the two workbooks. In Excel 2003, you’ll find this option on the Window menu.
2. Click the sheet tab in the source workbook and drag it to the target workbook. If you want to copy the sheet instead of move it, hold down the [Ctrl] key while you drag the sheet to the target workbook.

That’s all there is to it! The next time you need to copy or move worksheet data from one workbook to another just drag the worksheet.

Friendly Reminder: if the source worksheet contains a procedure that references another sheet in the source workbook, Excel will do its best to find the source workbook. If it can’t, when you run that procedure, you will get errors.