2. Freeze Panes

Now that we’ve cleaned up the spreadsheet a little with our handy hide feature, we want to check the scores of every student. However, when we try to scroll down… we can see the name of the student in Column A… but after we scroll far enough, the names of the columns (in row 1) scroll off the screen! Yes, we can still see the column “letters” (A, B, etc.)but we are unable to tell which column is which score unless we memorize it!

Since the computers are supposed to help make life easier – we hope we can get it to help us be able to always “see” what the titles of the columns are. Modern spreadsheets have this ability – it’s called “freezing” – or keeping a row (in this case) from scrolling.

In this example, we will be freezing both columns and rows. By freezing them, the columns and rows will always stay as the first column/row. In addition, you can freeze multiple column/rows, thus allowing users to keep track of multiple column/rows.

However, we will just start with the basics and freeze only the first column and first row. Lets click on the very first cell, A1. Then, let’s go to the View menu button, and click on it.

Look! There’s a Freeze Row button and a Freeze Column button! Let’s click on the freeze row button and then choose Freeze 1 row. To see what the effect was, scroll down again. The top row with the names of the scores should “stay” visible.

Let’s repeat for the freeze column button.

Once that’s set, try scrolling around!

Look, the first row and column will always be there, and thus when you scroll down or right, you’ll still know who’s the student and which column the student did what score on.

To unfreeze the rows/columns, just go back to the same View menu option and click on No frozen rows/columns. That should unfreeze them and restore them back to the previous version.

[QEx2.2] What uses can you think of when freezing a row is important? How about a column?

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