Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2020 January 11

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January 11

Question about formatting in Excel: how to freeze a row

First Name	Last Name	Date of Birth	Date of Death
John	Smith	March 16, 2000	November 8, 2017
Mary	Williams	July 2, 1987	October 30, 2001
Peter	Jones	November 22, 1994	May 1, 2014
Ann	Roberts	April 12, 2011	September 3, 2015

Lets say that I create the above table in Microsoft Excel. I am using this above simplistic example, simply to ask my question. Cell "A1" (for Column A) would be "First Name". Cell "B1" (for Column B) would be "Last Name". And so forth. Now, let's say that I have a very long list of 1,000 names. And I scroll all the way down to, say, the 500th name on the list. When I look up at the Excel spreadsheet, the columns will be labelled as A, B, C, D, etc. Is there some way to "make" the Excel program "rename" those columns? Instead of naming them A, B, C, D, ... can I somehow rename the columns as "First Name", "Last Name", etc. I am not talking about the cell entries in Cell A1 or Cell B1, etc. I am talking about the actual label of the column. When I scroll down to name #500 on the list ... the entries in the first row (A1, B1, etc.) will not still be visible to me (since they will be too far "up" on the screen page) ... and I won't remember what each column stands for, exactly. Can this be done? When I scroll down to name #500 on the list, I want to look up and see "First Name", "Last Name", etc., at the top of the columns ... not the generic A, B, C, D. The labels of the columns will be stationary, and not "move", as I scroll down. The items in Row 1 are not stationary, and they will "disappear" as I keep scrolling further down. Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 05:18, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

You can't do quite what you want, but you do have options. One is to lock the first row so it remains visible as you scroll the screen. Select row 1, go to the View ribbon, and choose "Freeze panes"->"Freeze top row".

If that isn't enough, you can also remove the display of the column names "A" etc, under Menu->Excel Options->Advanced->(scroll down)Display options for this worksheet->Show row and column headers. You lose the row numbers as well that way.-gadfium 06:00, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

@Gadfium: Thanks! Those are both very helpful. I will give them a try. Just so I am clear ... the column names always have to be the generic A, B, C, D, etc. ... whether they are actually displayed or not (per your second option) ... and those column labels can never be changed or altered or renamed, etc. Right? They must always be, simply, A, B, C, D, etc., ... no matter what ... correct? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 06:26, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

As far as I know. I'm using Excel 2007, perhaps an option was added in a later version.-gadfium 07:13, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

Great. Thanks! Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 16:33, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

I know this was marked as resolved, but just to clarify: the letter-number rubric for columns-rows can't be changed the way you mean. Yhey will always show up as they do currently. However, if you create a formal TABLE of your data, in a very real sense the column names you've mentioned will really be their titles. For example, formulas will use the column titles in them rather than the =B2+A3 stuff you're used to. So, if you added another column called Days Old to your dataset, the formula in cell E2 would read =D2-C2, right? Well, in a formally defined table, the formula would actually read =[@[Date of Death]]-[@[Date of Birth]] and the formula would automatically propogate through the entire dataset. I highly recommend the practice. Matt Deres (talk) 19:32, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Resolved