Thursday, May 28, 2009

Freeze those panes!!!

Excel provides a useful feature of freezing or locking a particular pane in a worksheet while you can scroll through the remaining contents in the sheet. This feature is quite useful when you have a lot of rows or columns in your sheet and you need to often scroll through the sheet to view them. This feature improves the readability of the document.

Freeze top pane:
Suppose you have a long list of names and with the column headers in the first row, then you would prefer to keep the first row static while scrolling through the list of names.

To freeze the top row, just click on the cell A2 in the sheet and use the option Window-->Freeze Panes.
Now, you will notice that even when you scroll down, the column headers remain static.
Freeze left pane:
If you want the first column in the sheet to be static/frozen, you can click on the cell B1 and then freeze the panes.

Freeze top and left panes:
If you want both the top and the left panes to be frozen, simply use the option on the cell B2. You will be able to scroll horizontally and vertically through your sheet keeping the first row and first column immovable.
The idea is you should always select the first movable cell when you select the ‘Freeze Panes’ option.

To unfreeze the panes, use the option Window-->Unfreeze Panes.