Here we have 3 easy steps that help you understand how to freeze cells in excel.
It keeps the row visible while you scroll through the rest of the sheet. It is very useful when working with a lot of data. Excel now allows more than a million rows and over 15,000 columns so, needless to say, workbooks can become extremely large and difficult to navigate.
The ability to freeze rows in excel will prevent having to scroll up and down repeatedly to view the column titles of the data or similarly to freeze columns in excel will prevent the constant sliding back and forth horizontally.
Under the VIEW tab on the top menu bar, you may select FREEZE PANES and you will see three options for freezing sections of data.
Freeze Panes excel is the first option. This allows you to keep several rows frozen while you navigate through the rest of the data. It is highly useful when there are more categories or subcategories in the header rows.
How To Freeze a Row In Excel: A Simple Example
This type of data would have “Address” in Row 1 merged across several cells and Row 2 would have “Street Address”, “City”, “State”, etc. underneath the “Address” Category. You could freeze both Row 1 and 2 to keep all headers visible.
How To Do This?
- Select the Row under the rows you would like to freeze by clicking on the row number to the left of each row. For the Address example, we would click on Row 3 because we want to view Rows 1 and 2.
- Under the VIEW tab select FREEZE PANES.
- Select FREEZE PANES again. A grey line will appear to show what rows will be frozen in place.
The Second Option
For freezing rows of data, you have to Freeze the First Row. This will freeze only the first row of the workbook to keep it visible as you scroll through the data. It is most useful when the data has just one header in the top row. You do not need to select the first row to freeze top row excel because you simply need to follow step 2 given above and select FREEZE TOP ROW Excel.
If at any time, you wish to unfreeze the rows you return to the VIEW tab and select UNFREEZE ROWS. The grey line will disappear and frozen rows will no longer stay visible as you scroll vertically through the workbook.
How to Freeze Columns in Excel?
Columns May Also Be Frozen By Following The Same Steps
As above but choosing the column instead of the row and selecting FREEZE PANE which will allow you to scroll Horizontally through the workbook and keep the columns to the left of the grey indicator line frozen in place. The third option is to FREEZE the FIRST COLUMN, which is exactly like freezing the first row.
Be cautious when locking several rows at once as some may become hidden and you won’t be able to see those cells later as you are scrolling. To resolve this issue, make absolutely sure that any rows you are attempting to lock are visible when you select the FREEZE PANES option.
Other view options that Excel offers are opening a new window to view your workbook or splitting the workbook to view several sections at a time.
