Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Using Watch Windows in Excel”.
In this tutorial, we’re gon na look at how to set up a watch window in Excel and you’ll see how it works and how useful it can be in your Excel spreadsheets. So here I have a simple spreadsheet, with some game sales from a hypothetical board game and card games store, and you can see the data extends over here to the right quite a ways at the far right. I have yearly total sales that are calculated by adding up the sales from all of these months and then multiplying the number of cells by the price of the board game in this case, so this spreadsheet is working out just fine for me, but let’s say I Want to run some scenarios, maybe I’d like to know what, if we would have charged $ 16 for boggle instead of 15, if we had somehow had the exact same number of sales, how would that have changed our yearly total sales? Well, it did I just it. The number went up, but I wasn’t able to see it as it moved up. So it’s kind of hard for me to know how much that increased by I’ll go back and change it back to 15, so watch what I do next, I’m gon na set up a watch window to track the yearly total sales and that way, while I’m changing These numbers here at the Left I’ll be able to see at the same time how that affects the yearly total sales here at the right step, 1 to set up a watch window is to click on a cell or, in this case, a range of cells that You would like to watch so I just clicked here and held the click and then dragged down to select the entire range I would like to watch now. I can release the mouse button and I’ll go here on the formulas.
Tab formulas ribbon here is watch window. Now watch window should be in most modern versions of Excel, with the exception I believe, of Mac. If you have excel for mac, i do not think watch window is included.
Ok, so again, with this range selected, i’m gon na go up and click watch window, and it takes me to this screen this window, but it’s empty and typically it will pop up at about this size, especially the first time that you use it. But what you’ll need to do is click, add, watch and because I already selected this Excel is smart and figures out that that’s probably what I want to watch. I could double-check it to make sure, but it is correct and then I’ll just click Add, and now I’ve set up a watch window. Now, let’s look at the data that it’s watching notice that it’s listing the book – in other words the workbook, that this data is from. It’S also noting the sheet. So this is the 2021 spreadsheet.
It lists the name of the range or the cell. In this case, these are not named cells and it’s got a list of each cell that it’s watching and the value and the formula that produces the value. So this is kind of an interesting watch window. It gives me some pretty interesting data now if I use the scroll bar to scroll to the left.
Look, the watch window stays focused on what I told it to watch so now I can go back into the data and run some numbers. Let’S say we charged $ 17 for boggle okay, here in the watch window, I could see that it moved up quite a bit the yearly total sales for boggle. So keep your eyes here on the total four code names it’s this 9000 number, let’s see what, if we had charged only $ 27 and sold the same amount, it drops the yearly total sales. So these watch windows that you can set up on the formulas. Tab formulas ribbon here in the formula auditing group there it is watch window. They can really help you to see data, that’s otherwise hard to see, and it’s especially useful if you have a giant spreadsheet or a workbook made up of multiple sheets.
If you want to see data, that’s far apart, but you want to see it together with other data watch window can really help you out with that. Let’S take it to another level by going to another spreadsheet or even workbook. In this case, I’ll just go to the 2021 monthly totals spreadsheet, and this won’t make a ton of sense, but I’ll click here on growth, forecast and I’ll click and drag down to select that at least as far down as the full data set goes with. That selected, I can click watch window, but watch window is really already activated, so there’s no need to click watch window this time.
Instead, I can just click. Add watch Excel. Wants me to verify the range that it’s going to much. That looks good, so I click ad and now my watch window is longer it’s bigger, but hopefully you can see that it’s now tracking two different sources of information, two different ranges of information. So, with this ad watch, you can watch data on two separate spreadsheets or two different parts of the same spreadsheet or even different workbooks when you’re finished with your watch window, if you don’t need it anymore, just go ahead and X out of it and continue using Excel as you normally would, if you want the watch window back, you can just click it again, and it should remember the watch windows that you’ve added in the past thanks for watching.
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