For some reason, with certain characters such as numbers, after a certain number of characters, it stops checking to see if it needs to add single quotes. This is caused because of the way Excel validates names. Note: there are no quote marks in the last formula listed above.There are exceptions to this illustrated by the example below where the name actually ends with a number ans still has no quote marks. It is alright to use numbers in the name of a worksheet as long as the name doesn’t start or end with a number as this will also cause Excel to add the single quotes. It is cleaner and more reliable to avoid them. Why are the quotes a problem? Well, it makes it hard to type the names of worksheets in Excel, they make the formulas longer and harder to read and lend themselves to errors. Furthermore, as other special characters also cause Excel to add the single quotes, it is best that these are also avoided and then, if you ever see single quotes in formulas referring to worksheets, then you will immediately see it as a warning sign. For this reason, I recommend avoiding all spaces in when naming worksheets. This is dangerous as users do not expect it and often can’t see it. It is also possible to use a space as the first or last character of a worksheet name. Compare the worksheet name above with the following worksheet name: Many people use spaces as a word separator in Excel but a Space will also cause Excel to add the single quotes. Why? Because, when you use characters such as Spaces, Dollars ($), Exclamation Marks (!) etc, Excel will wrap the worksheet name in single quotes. However, just because Excel lets you use certain characters, I would strongly recommend against using most special characters including spaces. You can use spaces, underscores (_) and periods (.) in the name as word separators.You can use all alphanumeric characters but not the following special characters:.A worksheet name cannot exceed 31 characters.The name must be unique within a single workbook.There are however a few rules when naming worksheets. You can add new worksheets and clone existing ones and all the worksheets can be renamed. Naming Syntaxīy default, a new workbook contains 3 worksheets and they are named Sheet1, Sheet2, Sheet3.
This article is all about the names you can give to a worksheet. This post applies to the following versions of Excel: Excel 2003, Excel 2007 & Excel 2010Įxcel workbooks contain individual worksheets and the number of worksheets in a workbook is limited only by the system memory of your computer.