Merge Excel files into sheets

What it is for

Sometimes the files you want to bring together do not share a structure: the budget, the stock list and the customer list have nothing in common, and stacking them would produce a meaningless table. You do not need to add rows together, you need everything in one file with each thing on its own tab.

That is what this tool does: you upload several files and get back a single .xlsx with one sheet per file, in the order you uploaded them.

The reason is usually practical: one attachment instead of twelve, a folder that stops filling up with loose versions, or a single workbook to send to someone who is only going to read it.

Merging into sheets is not stacking rows

Worth getting straight, because the two tools have similar names:

• Merging into sheets leaves each file on its own tab. The tables stay separate tables.
• Stacking rows fuses everything into one continuous table.

If the files have the same columns and you want to analyse them together in a pivot table, what you need is stacking. If they do not share a structure, what you need is this.

The sheet names

By default each sheet takes the name of the file it came from. That is almost always what you want, because most sheets in the world are called Sheet1 and three tabs called Sheet1 tell you nothing.

Turn on "Keep the original sheet names" and the name each sheet had inside its own file is preserved. That makes sense when those names are already descriptive — Summary, Detail, Notes — and are exactly the information you do not want to lose.

Note that if an input file contains several sheets, all of them end up in the result.