I have groups sheets written in Excel – which I love. But I’ve moved more to group sheets written in Word because I love the ability write my citations easily and to keep them well organized. But since my group sheets in Word are sized to fit in my planner, I do still use my Excel group sheets when I want to print a full sized version for my folders and binders.
My focus lately has been completely on my Stephens line. I’ve been working on 4 generations of Stephens families who scattered near and far and I get so frustrated with the number of William’s in each family! A man has a son named William and he and most of his siblings name a son William as well! They also tended to continue the tradition so before long, I’m looking at these different group sheets with Williams all over the place and I get confused on the relationships between them all. I ended up taping my group sheets to the wall so that I can see them all to find how each William is related! How much easier it is to look at a group sheet, click on a name, and go directly to HIS group sheet without searching the wall! Hyperlinks allow me to do this. I can link to group sheets for any name on the group sheet – siblings, wives or parents.
This is convenient because the more group sheets I make in the Excel workbook, the more clicking I need to do to find the tab for the sheet I’d look to look at next. I have 22 group sheets in this particular workbook and to quickly switch back and forth between two group sheets that don’t happen to be next to each other on my tabs can be a bit of a pain. By hyperlinking my group sheets, I can switch quickly to any group sheet that I’d like. Here are the steps for linking group sheets in the same Excel Workbook.
For my example, I will show my group sheet for Andrew J. Stephens and his wife, Lucy Stephens.
Let’s say that I want to make a link to Andrew’s son-in-law, William George. First I will right-click on the cell with William’s name.
A list of options will appear. I will click on “Hyperlink”.
A box of choices will appear. Since I want to link to an Excel page within this workbook, I will be sure to choose the “Place in this document” selection on the left and then a list of my various groups sheets will appear in the larger box on the right. I will find William George in my list and double click.
Now William’s name in the original group sheet is “hypertext blue” and I know that if I put my cursor over William’s name, the cursor will become a hand. When I click, I will go directly to his group sheet. (If I want to edit the text in the box, as long as the cursor is not a hand, I can click on the cell and edit the text.) From William’s group sheet, I can then make a hyperlink for his wife, Elizabeth and it would bring me right back to the group sheet I started from. I can hyperlink any name in my group sheet to move directly to their group sheet. Handy!
Next week, I’ll write about other ways that I use hyperlinking in my genealogy work.
