MVP #33: Freezing Panes and Splitting Window in Excel

Excel lets you lock some part of the Excel sheet so that they never scroll out of view. 

Normally, you’ll want to do this for the header of a long table (a table with hundreds of rows). So that as you keep scrolling down to the last row, the header row is always visible. 

It’s a very useful feature and is known as Freezing Panes.

It’s located under View menu.

It has 3 options:

1. Freeze Panes. 
You first select the cell after the rows and columns you want to freeze, and then choose this option. If you want to freeze the top row and first column, you’ll select cell B2 (after column A and row 1). 

2. Freeze Top Row. This is a straightforward option. It  lets you instantly freeze the top row. Very useful if you want the headers to always stay in view.

3. Freeze First Column. Also straightforward. It lets you freeze the first column. Very useful when working on a biodata file with lots of fields and the first field column contains the names you want to keep seeing as you scroll to the last field/column.

So let's move on to splitting window in Excel.

Excel lets you split the view of an Excel sheet into two. So you can work on two different parts of the sheet at the same time.

This is very useful for visually comparing two far away parts of the Excel sheet. I use it a lot when doing Stock Analysis. When I want to see what the impact of increasing the growth rate in cell D4 will do to the company’s profit margin in far away cell G115.

It’s also in the View menu.

See the red arrow? Notice the jump from row 12 to 110? That’s where I split the Excel sheet.

So now you know all you need about freezing and splitting in Excel.