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Excel worksheets can have a lot of cells
and sometimes you may find that you want
to view two different parts of the
spreadsheet at the same time for example
in this spreadsheet I have a list of
salespeople in the first column but when
I scroll to the right those names
disappear which makes it really hard to
see who the sales data belongs to we can
fix this by freezing the first column so
it will always stay visible first go to
the View tab and click freeze panes you
have a few different options but we just
want to freeze the first column
now when we scroll we can easily see the
names of each salesperson no matter
where they are in the spreadsheet the
spreadsheet also has dates in the second
row and I'd like to freeze them so
they'll stay visible when I scroll down
but this time is going to work a little
bit differently because it's Row two and
you can see why if you go to the freeze
panes command there's an option to
freeze the top row but there isn't an
option to just freeze the second row by
itself instead we'll need to freeze the
top two rows since we've already frozen
the first column we'll need to reset the
spreadsheet by selecting unfreeze panes
and now you have two options you can
either select the row below the rows
that you want to freeze or you can
select a single cell such as b3 if you
only select one cell it will freeze the
rows above it and also the columns to
the left and that's exactly what we want
next go to the freeze panes command and
select freeze panes and now you can see
a thin line in between rows two and
three and also aligned between columns a
and B when I scroll I can see all of my
header rows and columns no matter where
I am in the spreadsheet sometimes you
may need to work with two different
parts of the spreadsheet at the same
time there are a couple of ways to do
this
one way is to click the new window
command
this will give you two separate windows
and you may need to drag the top of each
window so you can see both of them
both of these worksheets are showing the
same file and we can use it to view two
different parts of the worksheet or if
the workbook has multiple sheets you can
view two of them side by side so I could
view the 2010 sales in one window and
the 2012 sales and another which makes
it very easy to compare the two years if
you want to go back to just viewing one
window you can close either one by
clicking the close button in the upper
right corner and then you can resize the
window or click the maximize button
another way to view two different parts
of a worksheet is to use the split
feature this is a little bit like
freezing panes except instead of
freezing them you can actually scroll
each section individually first if you
have any frozen panes you'll need to
unfreeze panes then select the cell
where you want the split to appear
usually somewhere near the middle and
then click the split command you can now
see that there are vertical and
horizontal dividers there are also four
scroll bars which you can use to scroll
the different sections now you may find
that this view is a little too cluttered
but you can make it simpler by removing
one of the dividers if you drag the
vertical divider all the way to the left
it will disappear and you'll just have a
horizontal divider by scrolling the top
and bottom sections we can compare the
data for any two salespeople for example
David Carlson and Melissa Post depending
on the spreadsheet some of these view
options may be better than others in
this example the header rows and columns
are really important so the freeze panes
feature is probably the best choice
you'll just have to try all of the view
options to see which one works best for
your spreadsheet
you