When we are working with a long Excel file that takes a lot of scrolling either downwards or over a bit, it can be helpful to lock in either the first or top header row of data so that you can see what you’re looking at. Something else that you can do with Excel is split the view and you can split it either vertically or horizontally.
This article shows how to freeze rows or columns in Excel. Also I will go through how to split view vertically or horizontally.
Freeze Columns and Rows
To freezing panes, go to the View tab, click freeze panes. Following figure shows the Freeze Panes menu in Microsoft Excel.
Freeze First Column will freeze the first column. As shown in below figure, it will freeze column A and now I can scroll through all of this data. To unfreeze it, come back here into Freeze panes in the View tab and click Unfreeze panes. It’s going to remove that line and now everything scrolls as usual.
Freeze panes is useful when files has a lengthy header. Similarly we can freeze panes. Select the row below the row(s) you want to freeze (select row 6, if you want to freeze rows 1 to 5). Place the cursor and it has to be on the left side on the edge here where I want the columns to freeze. I can go back to freeze panes. And this time I’ll select this top option, Freeze Panes. Now when I scroll, it’s going to keep that whole header file intact. That’s five rows worth of data.
Split View
Using Excel, we can split the view either vertically or horizontally. Let’s suppose I want to look at this data. And if I scroll a little bit lower, I want to look at this data side by side. I can do that by splitting the view. Splitting the view work similarly to marking the column in which it has to be on the left side, that is the edge of the screen. I’ll place my cursor on the cell that I want to split and I’ll choose Split which is right next to the Freeze Panes option as shown in above image.
Now we should see there’s two scroll bars on the right-hand side . The screen is split and I can see this data. And if I scroll up, I can see this data and I can look at them both at the same time even though they were far away from each other on the sheet.
To unsplit them, just click that Split button again and it puts your sheet back to normal. I can also do this with a column. This time I’ll click this entire column and select Split again. And now, I have these horizontal bars. It’s the same data. It’s just showing it to me in two different panes so that I can see them at the same time.