There four types of sheets available in Microsoft Excel: Worksheets, Chart sheets, MS Excel 4.0 macro sheets (obsolete, but still supported) and MS Excel 5.0 dialog sheets (obsolete, but still supported).
Worksheets
The most common type of sheet is a worksheet — which you normally think of when you think of a spreadsheet. Excel 2010 worksheets have 16,384 columns and 1,048,576 rows. Versions prior to Excel 2007 support only 256 columns and 65,536 rows. If you open such a file, Excel 2010 enters compatibility mode to work with the smaller worksheet grid. In order to work with the larger grid, you must save the file in one of the Excel 2010 formats. Then close the workbook and reopen it.
Having access to more cells isn’t the real value of using multiple worksheets in a workbook. Rather, multiple worksheets are valuable because they enable you to organize your work better. Back in the old days, when a spreadsheet file consisted of a single worksheet, developers wasted a lot of time trying to organize the worksheet to hold their information efficiently. Now, you can store information on any number of worksheets and still access it instantly.
You have complete control over the column widths and row heights, and you can even hide rows and columns as well as entire worksheets. You can display the contents of a cell vertically or at an angle and even wrap around to occupy multiple lines. In addition, you can merge cells together to form a larger cell.
By default, every new workbook starts out with three worksheets. You can easily add a new sheet when necessary, so you really don’t need to start with three sheets. You may want to change this default to a single sheet. To change this option, choose the File -> Options command, click the General tab, and change the setting for the option labeled Include This Many Sheets.
Chart sheets
A chart sheet holds a single chart. Many users ignore chart sheets, preferring to use embedded charts, which are stored on the worksheet’s drawing layer. Using chart sheets is optional, but they make it a bit easier to locate a particular chart, and they prove especially useful for presentations.
Macro sheets and dialog sheets
These two type of sheet are obsolete Excel features that continue to be supported.
An Excel 4.0 macro sheet is a worksheet that has some different defaults. Its purpose is to hold XLM macros. XLM is the macro system used in Excel version 4.0 and earlier. This macro system was replaced by VBA in Excel 5.0 and is not discussed in this book.
An Excel 5.0 dialog sheet is a drawing grid that can hold text and controls. In Excel 5.0 and Excel 95, dialog sheets were used to make custom dialog boxes. UserForms were introduced in Excel 97 to replace these sheets.