Your project's spreadsheet can hold more than one tab. Extra tabs are useful for static lookup tables — tax brackets, shipping rates, tier pricing — that your formulas read from. This article explains how secondary tabs behave and how to reference them.
The first tab is special
Only the first tab is connected to your calculator:
- Input blocks write their values into cells on the first tab.
- Result blocks read their cells from the first tab.
Any additional tabs are reference data — static snapshots that don't change in response to reader input. They exist purely so your main-tab formulas can look values up from them.
Where extra tabs come from
The most common way to get reference tabs is to import a multi-sheet Excel workbook. Each worksheet becomes a tab automatically: the first worksheet lands on the main tab, and the rest become reference tabs named after the original worksheets.
Referencing another tab
Read a cell on another tab by prefixing the reference with the tab's name and an exclamation mark:
=Rates!B2
If the tab name contains spaces, wrap it in single quotes:
='Tax Table'!B3
Ranges work the same way, which is what makes lookups across tabs possible:
=VLOOKUP(D1, Rates!A2:C20, 3, FALSE)
Here D1 is a value on the main tab (perhaps seeded by an input block), and the lookup table lives on the Rates tab.
Things to keep in mind
- Reference tabs are static. They don't recompute from reader input — treat them as fixed data. Put anything that needs to react to inputs on the main tab.
- Don't assign blocks to reference-tab cells. Input and result blocks only connect to the first tab; a cell on another tab won't update with reader input.
- Tab names are matched case-insensitively when a formula resolves a cross-sheet reference.
Where to go next
- Input rows and cell references — cross-sheet syntax in detail
- Formula functions reference —
VLOOKUP,INDEX,MATCH, and the rest - Importing Excel, CSV, and TSV — bringing workbooks in