How to Freeze Panes for Wide Spreadsheets in MS Excel?

An Alternative trick To Freeze Panes For Wide Spreadsheets.

When using wide spreadsheets, you will often need to work with data on the far right of the sheet but also keep visible the related data on the left. You may already know that a good solution for this is Freeze Panes. With Freeze Panes, you select the column to the right of the one you want to freeze and, from the View tab, click Freeze Panes, Freeze Panes. Now you can scroll to the right while the frozen column remains visible on the left.

Freeze Panes is a good solution but is not without its drawbacks.

We often find that when we are moving around on the right side of my worksheet using the arrow keys, we sometimes scroll too far to the left and our data on the right scrolls off the screen. Then we need to scroll to the right again. This can get aggravating when it happens over and over.

Freeze Panes

One simple solution / way is to temporarily hide the columns that we are not using.

Another solution that works great for worksheets where we regularly need to hide (and unhide) specific columns is to use Grouping. Grouping is normally used for hiding the details of subtotaled data but, in some cases, it can work great for quickly hiding and unhiding columns.

This would also work for hiding and unhiding specific rows but in most cases.

How to hide specific column(s) using Grouping in MS Excel.

**Note that if you want to hide multiple columns, the columns for each grouping must be contiguous...

1) Select the (contiguous) columns (e.g. Columns D:Q) you want to apply Grouping to;

2) From the Data tab click Group. An outline bar and [-] symbol appears above the columns. When you click the [-] symbol, the columns will be hidden and the symbol changes to a [+];

3) You can select other (contiguous) columns to apply grouping to.

Once you have finished grouping your columns, you will have a simple and quick way to quickly hide and unhide these columns whenever you need to.

To permanently remove the Grouping (and outline symbols) from a column or group of columns, select the columns and, from the Data tab, click Ungroup.