How to freeze panes in Excel

Freeze the top row or first column

You scroll down a long sales list and lose track of which column is Units and which is Price. Freezing the header row keeps it on screen while everything below scrolls.

Freeze Top Row keeps row 1 visible. Freeze First Column keeps column A visible when you scroll right, which helps when the Order ID or name is in column A and the table runs wide. You can't use both of these together; to keep row 1 and column A, use the method in the next section.

1. Press Ctrl+Home to jump to the top of the sheet.
2. Go to View > Freeze Panes.
3. Choose Freeze Top Row (or Freeze First Column).
4. A thin gray line appears under row 1. Scroll down to check.

Freeze rows and columns at the same time

Freeze Panes (the first option) freezes everything above and to the left of the cell you've selected. That one rule covers every case: select B2 to keep row 1 and column A, A3 to keep rows 1 and 2, or C2 to keep row 1 and columns A and B.

In this sheet, clicking B2 keeps the headers and the Order IDs on screen. Scroll right to Revenue and you can still see which order each number belongs to.

Keyboard: Alt, W, F, F freezes panes at the selected cell. Alt, W, F, R is Freeze Top Row and Alt, W, F, C is Freeze First Column.

1. Scroll to the top so row 1 is visible.
2. Click the first cell below the rows and right of the columns you want to keep, for example B2.
3. Go to View > Freeze Panes > Freeze Panes.

Why the wrong rows froze

Freeze Panes works on what's on screen. If you scrolled down so row 40 is at the top of the window and then froze at B42, rows 40 and 41 are frozen and rows 1 to 39 are hidden above the line. You can't scroll up to them until you unfreeze.

The fix is to unfreeze, press Ctrl+Home, and freeze again. Doing Ctrl+Home before you freeze is a habit worth keeping.

Freeze Panes is grayed out while you're editing a cell (press Esc first) and in Page Layout view (go to View > Normal). You can only freeze rows at the top and columns at the left: to keep a summary in the middle in view, use Split or move the summary to the top.

1. Go to View > Freeze Panes > Unfreeze Panes.
2. Press Ctrl+Home.
3. Select the right cell and freeze again.

Split vs Freeze Panes

View > Split cuts the window into two or four panes that each scroll on their own. It's handy to compare row 5 with row 500 without scrolling back and forth. Drag the split bars to move them, or click Split again to remove it.

Freeze locks part of the window in place. Split lets every part move. You can't have both at once, so pick Freeze for headers and Split for comparing two distant parts of the same sheet. For two different sheets, View > New Window and View > Arrange All put them side by side.

Headers when printing, and the Table shortcut

Freezing only affects the screen. On paper, page 2 has no header row unless you set Print Titles. Go to Page Layout > Print Titles, click in Rows to repeat at top and select row 1 ($1:$1). Every printed page then starts with the headers.

If your data is an Excel Table (Ctrl+T), you get headers for free: when you scroll down past the header row with a cell selected inside the table, the column letters A, B, C are replaced by the table's column names. A Table's Total Row uses SUBTOTAL(109,...), which adds only the rows left visible when you filter: 1,109.25 for all eight orders here.