Working with large amounts of data can cause nightmares since you are continuously scrolling up and down to see what row you are referring to. Things can get even more complicated if you need to reference a date at the top of the document with a reference on a column. Luckily in Excel, we can lock in place these columns and rows to make data viewing much more natural. This blog post will go over how to freeze panes in excel, how to freeze rows, and how to freeze columns quickly, and finally how to unfreeze everything. One of the best parts of excel is that these changes will pick up when you open the saved document on any device. Let’s begin.
How to Freeze Rows in Excel
Let’s say you have a bunch of dates at the top of your document like I have. Whenever I scroll down, I don’t want to lose what day I am looking up. To keep these dates in place, you need to select the row that you want to stay in place. For this example, I want to lock in place row 1. That means I can click on cell A1, B1, C1, D1, and so on. As long as I am somewhere in row 1, I am good to go.
Just click on any cell with the row you want to freeze and head over to the freeze panes and click on the “freeze top row pane” choice. Now you can scroll up and down, and you won’t lose the dates on your document.
How to Freeze Columns in Excel
Just like the steps for the row, you want to click on the column you want to keep in place. Let’s say that I want to lock in place column A in place. That means I have to click somewhere in A1, A2, A3, A4, and so on. Once I click on one of those cells, I am going to head back to the freeze panes section and click on the column first button. Now you can move left and right, and the column that you kept in place will not run out of place.
How to Freeze Both Rows and Column
Here is where things might seem tricky, but the solution is straight forward to do. Let’s say you want to lock both the row and the column, so you follow the steps above, and you realize that the row or column is not stuck in place. To fix this, you need to select a cell that is one lower than what you want to lock and choose one column to the right that you want to block.
For example, I want to lock in row 1 and column A for my excel document. To do this, I am going to select cell B2 and go over to the freeze panes section. Now you want to choose the freeze panes section, and you will see that you have now successful locked in place the row and the column for your document.
How to Unfreeze
Let’s say that you locked in a row, a column, or even a row and a column, but you need to remove that. To do this is simple. Just click on the area that you want to unfreeze, head over to the free panes section, and click on unfreeze. As a note, you won’t see this option unless you have already locked in place a row or a column.
Take it Further
Everything that we have gone over has been with either one row or one column. Let’s say you have a very complicated document that needs to have multiple rows and columns all frozen. To do this, you need to use the split function. To do this, you want to again select below the row and to the right of what you want to split and click on the split button. From here, you can move up, and down the split bar, so you can view the data in any way you want.
Conclusion
Working with locking rows and columns will make viewing and analyzing data so much more comfortable. One of the best parts of Office 365 is that you can view these documents on all different screens. One thing that I do is view reports on the go, so I use my android phone to view excel documents. With the rows and columns locked in place, I can see that as well on my phone which makes displaying the text so much more comfortable. The excel app is on both the iPhone store and the Google store if you wanted to download it.
