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Freeze rows and columns to keep specific areas visible when you scroll in a worksheet.

Freeze the first column

• Select View > Freeze Panes > Freeze First Column.

  Note: The faint line that appears between Columns A and B inidates that your first column is frozen.

Unfreeze rows and columns

• Select View > Freeze Panes > Unfreeze Panes.

Freeze rows and columns

1. Select the cell below the rows and to the right of the columns you want to keep visible when you scroll.

2. Select View > Freeze Panes > Freeze Panes.

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Freeze rows and columns

In an Excel 2016 Worksheet you have over a million rows to work with and over 16,000 columns to work with.

Now, if you start to add so much data that you can't see it all in one screen, there are some cool features to help you with getting things lined up.

We can freeze rows and columns, also known as panes.

Let's go down to our zoom slider down below and click the plus sign.

I'm gonna zoom in to over 140 percent.

I'm gonna go up to 150, and you'll notice now we have a scroll bar here that allows us to scroll left to right.

When we go over to the right to see the last few columns, We can no longer see the first column with our location.

So, when we look at these values, we can't really line them up with anything unless we've memorized that, okay there they are; London, Paris, San Francisco, Hong Kong.

Wouldn't it be better if we could always see this content. That means freezing column A.

When we scroll down, eventually we lose those labels for the months, and we have no idea what months we're looking at here.

Let's talk about freezing panes. The first thing we'll do is go up to the View tab on the ribbon.

Give it a click. You will see a Freeze Panes drop down button.

Give it a click and there are three options. Freeze Panes, we'll come back to that in a second.

Freezing the top row means we'll always be able to see the top row as we scroll down.

All that means is we'll always be able to see our title.

That's not gonna be very helpful. Freezing the first column though might be helpful.

Let's give that a click. Notice the faint line that appears between columns A and B, and now when we use our scroll bar to scroll to the right, we always see the contents of column A.

When we go all the way over to the totals, we can see the totals and line them up with the actual locations.

But, as we scroll down, we still lose those labels for the different months, and we don't really know what data we're looking at.

Let's scroll all the way back to the left and instead of just freezing column A, we wanna freeze column A and all of the rows above row six so that we can see January, February, March, et cetera.

In that case, we'll go up to the drop down.

Now we see Unfreeze Panes at the top, so we'll give that a click.

You can see it unfreezes that first column, and now we can choose exactly what we wanna freeze.

We want everything to the left of column B, so we need to click somewhere in column B.

We also wanna see all of the rows from one to five.

That means clicking below row five, which means by clicking in cell B6 we'll be able to see everything to the left and everything above when we go back up to Freeze Panes and this time choose Freeze Panes.

This allows us to freeze both rows and columns at the same time. Now look what happens when we scroll down.

We'll always be able to see those labels for January, February, March, et cetera, and when we scroll over to the right, we've frozen that first column so we'll always know what data we're looking at thanks to freezing panes here in Excel.

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