How to freeze a row in excel mac 2008

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We all love the ability to organize data, in spreadsheets.  I love Excel 2008 and its other versions, though I always am aware of ways that things can be improved.  I’m sure the tip in this article for Excel 2008 for the Mac will apply to other versions as well.

Okay—so if you’re using the spiffy new Excel 2008 for Mac—you may have had the chance to learn some new things over and against the older versions.

One thing that you may have learned to do (in older Excel versions) is keep data relevant by maintaining the visibility of row-header (left column) and column-header (top-row) title information by using the Excel option freeze panes from the window menu. (This is from a list of Excel tutorials—which did seem to pose some problems for a few people accessing it.)

You might have a problem using this option, if you’re working in Mac’s Excel 2008.  The reason would be that you’re in the Page View mode, rather than the Normal View mode—which can be selected from the “View Menu.”

I like the “Page Layout” view because it gives you the feeling of holding ordinary paper, and gives you the view of what your printed Excel sheets will look like, but because freezing panes does not affect printing, it cannot thus affect how “Page Layout” view will look.  “Normal View” is where you want to be.

This answer was found on the following help forum thread: “Excel Freeze Panes ghosted – Why?” which taught me an invaluable lesson about forum diving:

Forum Help Tip #1: Scrolling to the bottom of a help forum may save you some time, though I may have learned more by reading the whole thing.  (The above forum thread has the answer at the bottom—as the last post.)

So, true to form, as mentioned above:

If you find yourself asking “How do I freeze panes in Excel 2008 for the Mac?” and can’t freeze panes because the option is gray / greyed-out, ghosted, or whatever you call it, here’s your answer:

Use “Normal” view, not “Page Layout” and Freeze Panes will work fine.  (Use the “View” menu.)

P.S.  Having to research this tip helped me remember why I was blogging, and lifted me out of a doldrums of existential questioning about the life of this blog itself, at least for the moment.  This experience with not being able to freeze panes in Microsoft Excel 2008 for the Mac left me with this thought: in other words: one practical reason I started this blog was to remember/record ways of helping keep track of vital things I’d learned in an easy-to-find place, while sharing them with other people.

P.P.S. I’ve discovered (having lost this article once) that WordPress doesn’t seem to autosave all the data in a blog post (not my main text, anyhow—though my zemanta assisted keywords and meta-stuff remained).  Maybe composing in Google docs or the like would be a better idea?

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Freeze or lock rows and columns in an Excel worksheet

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When you are working with a large spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel, it's easy to find yourself scrolling down or across and losing track of where you are. This lesson explains how to freeze rows and columns (officially known as "Freeze Panes") in Excel 2010 for Windows and Excel 2011 for Mac.

Why you might need to freeze rows or columns in your spreadsheet

• Imagine you have a spreadsheet that contains sales data for January. The worksheet contains daily data that reports the sales for each person in your sales team, broken down by products sold:
  
• This example actually has 85 rows of data (the table carries on down further than this screenshot shows):
• Once you scroll down, however, the heading row disappears off the top of the screen, and you can no longer be sure what each column contains:

• This is a simple example, but it's not hard to imagine that with a lot more columns and rows, the problem would get considerably more complex,
• To solve the problem, you can freeze or lock the heading rows so that they don't disappear off the top of the screen as you scroll down the worksheet. The proces for doing this is slightly different between Excel 2010 for Windows and Excel 2011 for Mac, so I've covered both here:

How to freeze rows and columns

• You have two options for freezing panes in Excel. Note that these steps also apply to freezing columns:
  • Freeze several rows and/or columns
  • Freeze just the first row (or column)
• To freeze just one row, click the View menu, and find the Freeze Panes button (if you're using Excel 2011 for Mac, click the Layout menu to find the Freeze Panes button)
  
  
• When you click the Freeze Panes button, you can choose Freeze Top Row from the expanded Freeze Panes options. If you wanted to freeze the first column, you would then go back and choose that option. The screenshot below is from Excel 2010 for Windows. In the Mac version of Excel the options are the same, but you don't get the explanations of each option that you see here:
  
  
• Things get slightly more complicated if you want to freeze more than one row or column. If you look at the first screenshot in this lesson, you'll see that the first row doesn't actually contain the headings for the sales data table - it contains the title of this worksheet.
• To freeze the heading row of the table, you will have to freeze the first five rows in the worksheet. To do this, click in the cell A6 (i.e the first row that should not be frozen) and choose the first option in the Freeze Panes drop-down menu (it's also called Freeze Panes).
• When you do this, not much will appear to change. All you'll see is a line stretching across the screen, almost like a border along the bottom of row 5 (which is the last row to be frozen in our example). The screenshot shows what Freeze Panes looks like if you had clicked B6 before clicking Freeze Panes (i.e. you wanted rows 1-5 and column A to be frozen):
  
  
• Here's what the sales data table looks like if you scroll down. As you can see, the first five rows have stayed put, and the other rows have disappeared underneath them as I've scrolled down the screen:
  
  

How to unfreeze panes in Excel

Unfreezing panes is, fortunately, fairly simple:

• In Excel 2010 for Windows, choose the View menu, click the Freeze Panes button. The first option, which was Freeze Panes, is now Unfreeze Panes. Click that option and the frozen rows will be unfrozen.
• In Excel 2011 for Mac, choose the Layout menu and choose Unfreeze Panes (for some reason, it's a separate option which only becomes available once you have frozen panes).

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Want to learn more? Try these lessons:

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