How Do I Lock The Top Row In Excel

How to Freeze Rows and Columns in Excel

Microsoft Excel How to Freeze and Unfreeze Columns

(Image credit: Microsoft)

When you're working with a lot of spreadsheet data on your laptop, keeping track of everything can be hard. It's one matter to compare one or ii rows of information when dealing with a small subset of data, but when a dozen rows are involved, things get unwieldy. And we haven't even started talking nigh columns still. When your spreadsheets become unmanageable, in that location's only 1 solution: freeze the rows and columns.

Freezing rows and columns in Excel makes navigating your spreadsheet much easier. When done correctly, the chosen panes are locked in place; this means those specific rows are always visible, no matter how far yous coil down. More often than non, yous'll only freeze a couple of rows or a column, simply Excel doesn't limit how many of either you can freeze, which can come up in handy for larger sheets.

This how-to works with Microsoft Excel 2016 likewise every bit subsequently versions. However, the this method also works with Google Sheets, OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Ready to get to work? Here's how to freeze rows and columns in Excel:

More: How to put Windows 10 into Prophylactic Mode
Here's how to lock cells in Excel
This is how to use VLOOKUP in Excel

How to freeze a row in Excel

1. Select the row right beneath the row or rows you want to freeze. If you want to freeze columns, select the cell immediately to the right of the column you desire to freeze. In this case, we want to freeze rows 1 to 5, so we've selected row 6.

2. Get to the View tab. This is located at the very top, inbetween "Review" and "Add-ins."

3. Select the Freeze Panes option and click "Freeze Panes." This choice can be found in the same identify where "New Window" and "Arrange All" are located.

That'southward all there is to information technology. As you can see in our example, the frozen rows will stay visible when yous scroll downwardly. Y'all tin tell where the rows were frozen past the green line dividing the frozen rows and the rows beneath them.

If you want to unfreeze the rows, become back to the Freeze Panes command and choose "Unfreeze Panes".

Note that under the Freeze Panes control, yous can also choose "Freeze Top Row," which will freeze the top row that'south visible (and any others above information technology) or "Freeze Offset Column," which will keep the leftmost column visible when y'all scroll horizontally.

Besides assuasive yous to compare different rows in a long spreadsheet, the freeze panes feature lets you keep important information, such equally table headings, e'er in view.

Need more Excel tricks? Check out our tutorials on How to Lock Cells in Excel and How to Apply VLOOKUP in Excel.