- [Instructor] When you're working with a long Excel file,
that takes a lot of scrolling,
either downwards or across a bit.
It can be helpful
to lock in either the first or top header row of data,
so that you can see what you're looking at.
It's called freezing panes
and you can do it in Excel.
Change to the view tab and click freeze panes.
Something that we can do is freeze the first column.
What it's going to do is freeze column A,
and now I can scroll horizontally through all of this data.
I don't have to remember what category I'm looking at.
To unfreeze it,
come back here into freeze panes,
which again is in the view tab,
and click unfreeze panes.
It's going to remove that line
and now everything scrolls as normal.
Something else that you might want to do
is freeze just the top row.
Many times, though not in this sheet in particular,
the first row is all column headers.
Things like first name, last name, dollar amounts, anything.
If you're scrolling through a long list,
you may forget what those values are.
But if you freeze the top row,
you'll still be able to see them while you're scrolling.
But what about a sheet like this,
which has a lengthy header file.
It's got more then a few rows,
and I want to make sure
I can see these dates while I'm scrolling.
What I can do is place the cursor,
and it has to be on the left-hand side of the edge here
where I want the columns to freeze.
I'll go back to freeze panes,
and this time I'll select the top option, freeze panes.
This option is based on my selection.
So now when I scroll,
it's going to keep that whole header file intact.
And again, I can come back into freeze panes,
and this time it says unfreeze panes.
So now it will scroll as normal.
Something else that you can do with Excel is split the view
and you can either split it vertically or horizontally.
Let's suppose I want to look at this data here,
the executives,
but if I scroll down,
I also want to look at some marketing data
and data below that.
But they're not near each other.
I can do this by splitting the view.
Splitting the view works similarly to marking the column
in which it has to be on the left-hand side,
that is, the edge of the screen.
I'll place cursor on the cell that I want to split,
and I'll click the split button,
which is right next to the freeze button.
Now it's hard to see this line here,
but what I do see on the right-hand side
is now there's two different sets of scroll bars.
The screen is split,
and I can look at this data here
and I can look at this data here.
I can look at them both at the same time,
even though they were far away from each other on the sheet.
In fact, if I wanted to I can hover my mouse
over the line where I initiated the split,
and drag it up.
You'll see here on the right,
I just split the scroll bar perfectly in half.
To unsplit them, just click that split button again,
and it puts your sheet back to normal.
I can also do this with a column.
This time, I'll select the entire column
and click split again.
And now, I have these horizontal bars.
It's the same data.
It's just showing it to me in two different panes
so that I can see them at the same time.
Maybe I want to see February near November.
And again, I can click split again,
which is from the view ribbon tab
and it puts everything back to the way it was.