Excel copy worksheet problem

Excel copy worksheet problem

During a recent Excel training course we discovered an Excel copy worksheet problem that may confuse some people. The bug appears to exist in Excel 2010 and Excel 2013 and perhaps some of the older versions.

It seems that in some cases where you right click on the sheet name and attempt to make a copy, it creates a new sheet but it is a blank sheet. It only seems to occur with long sheet names (getting to the limit of the sheet names)

So, if you make a copy of a sheet called

• ‘Long Sheet Name Example sheet’

it creates a perfect copy but it calls the sheet

• ‘Long Sheet Name Example she (2’

because the sheet name is too long. If you try and create a copy of this sheet it creates a blank sheet but not a copy.

It seems that if you have long sheet names, you need to change the sheet name each time before creating a new copy as Excel is not handling the copy number with only 1 bracket i.e. ‘(2’, correctly. Might just be easier to shorten the sheet name and create all the copies you need.