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How to freeze rows or columns with panes in Excel

Updated: Nov 27, 2022


With Excel it's often quite convenient to freeze part of your spreadsheet and keep it visible at all time. Typically, freezing the top rows of left columns of your Excel spreadsheet allows you to scroll down but keep an eye on the headers.

This result can be achieved by freezing panes. Panes can be recognied by a grey vertical or horizontal line.


How to freeze panes in Excel

To freeze the 1st row, go in the "View" tab, click "Freeze Panes" and then "Freeze Top Row".


Freeze Top Row in Excel

To freeze the 1st column, go in the "View" tab, click "Freeze Panes" and then "Freeze First Column".


Freeze First Column in Excel

You can also freeze multiple rows, multiple columns, or a combination of any number of rows and columns. To do so:

  1. Select the first row that you don't need to keep visible. For instance if you want to freeze columns A to D, select any cell in column E. If you want to freeze rows 1 to 3, select any cell in row 4. And if you want to freeze columns A to D AND rows 1 to 3, select cell E4.

  2. Go in the "View" tab, click "Freeze Panes" and then "Freeze Panes".


Freeze Panes in Excel

Note: when you freeze panes, the areas on the top or left of your spreadsheet are really frozen. If you scroll, they will always remain visible. If you would like to be able to scroll in the frozen area, what you need it is to Split panes, as explained below.


How to unfreeze panes in Excel

Go to the "View" tab, click "Freeze Panes" and then "Unfreeze Panes".


Unfreeze panes in Excel

How to split a worksheet in Excel

While freezing panes allows you to freeze an area located at the top or left of your spreadsheet, you may want a different behavior and be allowed to scroll within each of the separated parts of the worksheet.

For this you need not to freeze but to split your worksheet. It works exactly like freezing panes, but instead go to the "View" tab, and click "Split".


Unfreeze panes in Excel

The areas delimited are not frozen and you can scroll in each of them separately. Contrary to frozen panes, you can also drag and drop the pane to move it to a different row or column.

To unsplit, just click again on the "Split" button.


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