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
we are in the spreadsheet.
This 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 it's going to work a little differently because it's row 2.
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 2 and 3, and also a line 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 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 windows 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 in another—which makes
it very easy to compare the two years.
If you want to go back to just viewing one window, you 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 scrollbars, which you can use to scroll the different sections.
Now you may find that this view is a little bit 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.