Taking Pictures

Excel allows you to capture "pictures" of your worksheets that you can use in other worksheets. This may sound odd, but it is quite helpful at times. You capture pictures by using the Camera tool. You can customize your toolbars as described in past issues of ExcelTips to make the camera tool available. (When you are doing your customizing, the Camera tool is available on the Commands tab in the Tools section. It is near the bottom of the list of commands and looks--oddly enough--like a small camera.)

With the Camera tool in place, follow these steps:

1. Select the cells or range of which you want a picture taken.
2. Click on the Camera tool. The mouse pointer changes to a large plus sign.
3. Change to a different worksheet.
4. Click where you want the top left-hand corner of the picture to appear. The picture is inserted as a graphic on the worksheet.

Now you can manipulate the picture the same as you would any other graphic--stretch it, resize it, crop it, move it, or whatever. The really cool thing, however, is that the picture is dynamic. This means that if you change the information in the original range (that you selected in step 1), then the information in the picture changes as well.