How to Freeze Cells in Excel

When you are using an Excel spreadsheet, you could potentially deal with thousands of cells. In order to keep some rows and columns visible while scrolling through the entirety of your sheet, you can freeze them in place. If you want to easily edit two parts of the spreadsheet at once, splitting your panes will make the task much easier.

Steps

Freezing Cells

1. Determine what you want frozen. Frozen cells will stay on the screen while you scroll through the rest of your spreadsheet. This is very useful if you want the column headers or row labels to be visible anywhere on the spreadsheet. You can only freeze whole rows or columns.^[1]
   
2. Click the "View" tab. Find the "Window" group. This contains the "Freeze Panes" button.
   
3. Freeze the top row. If your top row contains column headers and you want them to always be visible, you can freeze the top row. Click the "Freeze Panes" button and select "Freeze Top Row". A line will appear underneath the top row, and it will stay on the screen if you scroll down.
   
4. Freeze the leftmost column. If you have a lot of columns that you need to fill out and want to be able to see the identifier for each row, you can freeze the leftmost column. Click the "Freeze Panes" button and select "Freeze First Column". A line will appear to the right of the first column, and it will stay on screen if you scroll to the right.
   
5. Freeze columns and rows. You can freeze both columns and rows if you want them to stay on the screen. The frozen columns and rows must connect to the edge of the spreadsheet, but you can freeze multiple columns and rows at once.
   
   • For example, you can freeze columns A and B, but you can't freeze just column B.
   • To choose what you want frozen, select the column that you want to be the new upper corner, click the "Freeze Panes" button, and then select "Freeze Panes". Everything above and to the left of the cell will be frozen. For example, if you select cell C5, rows 1-4 will be frozen along with columns a and B.
6. Unfreeze your cells. If you want to return the spreadsheet to normal, click the "Freeze Panes" button and select "Unfreeze Panes". The frozen cells will be unlocked.
   

Splitting Panes

1. Decide what you want split. Splitting your panes allows you to scroll your separate sections individually. This is very useful for large spreadsheets that you need to manipulate several areas of at once.
   
   • When splitting, you split from the right and from the top.
2. Drag the split bars. The split bars are small bars located at the top of the vertical scrollbar and the right of the horizontal scrollbar. Click and drag these bars to set your new split border. You can scroll the spreadsheet in each individual frame you create.
   
   • Dragging split bars is no longer available in Office 2013. Instead, you can click the "Split" button in the "View" tab to create a default split that you can then click and drag to adjust.
3. Remove a split. If you want remove the split, double-click the split bar to make it disappear.
   

Sources and Citations

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