I really feel for people who struggle with their Excel spreadsheets not knowing some of the features that really help create and update the data that they are using. I wish I could have every person in in every company come to my training sessions for the basic level of Microsoft products. I recently had a person on one of my level 2 course who did not know that there was a feature called Freeze Panes. This could be the revelation you too have been looking for.
Freeze panes is when you can keep one or more rows and/or one or more columns static on your screen. When you scroll down a large data sheet the rows that you have frozen are still there in sight whereas your data could be showing the last row some hundreds of rows down. This feature is very useful when you have a large spreadsheet and the data is similar across the sheet. You can tell which column or row of information you are looking at as the column headings or rows are always in view.
Here is an example or a large sheet.
As you can see the data goes down to row 2156.
- Select the cell which is under the header row and to the right of the column you wish to always see.
- From the View Tab, select the Freeze Panes Tool.
You are presented with three options.
Selecting the first option will result in a light back line, like a border, under the row you wish to remain static and to the right of the column you wish to remain static.
Scroll to the end of your data and you will still see the headings in the first row and the names in the first column.
The other two options in the list for freeze panes allows you to quickly select just the very first row or the very first column to be fixed. It is just one or the other. Not both.
Some people try to use these in haste and find that their spreadsheet has a title in row one before the headings row which is in row two. In these cases, you need to use the first option of Freeze Panes having selected the cell directly under the header row, whichever row that might be, and to the right of the column you wish to always see. If you do not need the first column frozen then select the cell in column A and select Freeze Panes from the list of three options.
Here is the result of choosing the first option and looking at the last line of data and only the last 4 columns but still able to see first column.
