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Too many sheets in Excel? 7 ways to navigate a large workbook

Excel’s tab strip fits somewhere between five and fifteen sheet names, depending on how long they are. Past that you are clicking tiny arrows. Here is everything Excel for Windows gives you to get around, from built-in tricks to add-ins.

1Right-click the scroll arrows for a list of sheets

The least-known feature in Excel’s tab strip: right-click either of the small arrows at the bottom left, to the left of the first tab. Excel opens an Activate dialog that lists every visible sheet. Double-click one to go to it.

It works in every version, but it is modal — the list closes as soon as you pick a sheet — and it cannot search, so in a long workbook you are still scrolling a list. Hidden sheets are not in it.

While you are down there: Ctrl+click the left or right arrow scrolls the tab strip straight to the first or last sheet, without changing the active sheet.

2Next and previous sheet from the keyboard

Fine for neighbours, slow for a sheet thirty tabs away. On many laptops without dedicated Page keys, it is Ctrl+Fn+↑/↓. There are more in the full list of sheet shortcuts.

3Jump by name with Go To or the Name Box

If you know the sheet’s name, press F5 (or Ctrl+G), type a reference such as 'Cash Flow Q2'!A1 and press Enter. The same reference typed into the Name Box, left of the formula bar, does the same. The quotes are needed whenever the name contains a space or punctuation.

Go To also remembers the last few references you jumped to, which makes it a rough way of flipping between two sheets. You do need the exact name — there is no partial match.

4Give the tab strip more room

The tab strip shares its row with the horizontal scroll bar. Drag the small vertical divider between them to the right and more tabs fit. Shorter sheet names and tab colours for each group of sheets help too, though neither changes the basic arithmetic of a horizontal strip.

5Build an index sheet with links

A sheet at the front with one clickable link per sheet is the classic workaround. With the names typed in column A, starting in A2, put this in B2 and fill down: 

=HYPERLINK("#'" & A2 & "'!A1", A2)

Clicking the link jumps to cell A1 of that sheet. To avoid typing the names, see how to list all sheet names with a formula or a macro. The catch is upkeep: add or rename a sheet and the index is out of date until you refresh it, and links to chart sheets do not work because they have no cells.

6The Navigation pane in Microsoft 365

Recent Microsoft 365 builds of Excel have View › Navigation, which opens a pane listing the workbook’s sheets with the tables, charts and named ranges inside each. It is included in your subscription, so check for it first.

It is not in Excel 2016, 2019 or 2021, and it is built for browsing a workbook’s contents rather than for jumping between sheets from the keyboard.

7A sheet navigator add-in

If you live in big workbooks every day, an add-in that keeps a vertical list of sheets open beside the grid removes the problem rather than working around it. The options for Windows Excel:

Try the keyboard loop in your browser. The demo on the home page is a working copy of the pane — press Ctrl+Shift+S and type.

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