How to Freeze Panes in Excel: Rows, Columns or Both

How to freeze panes in Excel so your headings stay on screen

Scroll down a long sheet and the headings disappear, so column F could be anything. Freezing panes pins the rows and columns you choose, and the rest of the sheet scrolls underneath them.

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> Short version:
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> - Top row only: View, Freeze Panes, Freeze Top Row.
> - First column only: View, Freeze Panes, Freeze First Column.
> - Both, or more than one row: click the cell below and to the right of everything you want to keep, then View, Freeze Panes, Freeze Panes.
> - Undo it: View, Freeze Panes, Unfreeze Panes.
> - Frozen panes are for the screen only. Printing repeat headings is a different setting.

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The one rule worth remembering

Excel freezes everything above and to the left of the cell you selected. That single sentence explains every result you will get, including the ones that look wrong.

So if you select cell A1 and click Freeze Panes, nothing appears to happen. There is nothing above or to the left of A1 to keep.

Freeze the top row

1. Open the View tab.
2. Click Freeze Panes.
3. Choose Freeze Top Row.

A thin line appears under row 1. Scroll down and the headings stay. You do not need to select the row first, and it always takes row 1, whatever is on your screen at the time.

Freeze the first column

Same menu, choose Freeze First Column. Useful for a sheet where the names or the account numbers sit in column A and the months run off to the right.

Freeze both, or several rows

This is the one people get wrong, and the rule above is the fix. Click the cell that sits below the last row you want to keep and right of the last column you want to keep, then choose Freeze Panes, the third option.

To keep row 1 and column A, click B2. To keep a three row header block and the first two columns, click C4.

If the result is not what you expected, unfreeze, look at which cell is selected, and try again. You are almost always one row or one column out.

On a Mac

The same place: the View tab, then Freeze Panes. The three options behave exactly as they do on Windows.

On Windows you can also run it from the keyboard with Alt, then W, then F, then F. That is a ribbon shortcut and Mac Excel has no ribbon shortcuts, so on a Mac use the menu.

When Freeze Panes is greyed out

Three usual causes, in the order they happen:

1. You are in Page Layout view. Freezing only works in Normal view. On the View tab, click Normal, then try again.
2. You are still editing a cell. The ribbon is half disabled while the cursor is blinking inside a cell. Press Escape first.
3. The sheet is protected. Unprotect it under the Review tab, if you are allowed to.

Freeze panes and printing are different settings

Frozen panes do nothing to a printout. If you want the heading row repeated at the top of every printed page, use Page Layout, then Print Titles, then set Rows to repeat at top to $1:$1.

People often freeze panes, print, and find page two has no headings. The two settings look related and are not.

Split, and when it beats freezing

View, Split cuts the window into panes that each scroll on their own. Freezing keeps one part still. Splitting lets you look at row 4 and row 900 of the same sheet at the same time, which is the better tool when you are comparing two distant parts of one table.

Remove it the same way: View, Split again.

A table does some of this for you

Select your data and press Ctrl+T to turn it into an Excel table. When you scroll, the column letters at the top are replaced by your own headings, so you keep your bearings without freezing anything. It does not help across columns, so for a wide sheet you will still want a frozen first column.

Practise the parts around it

Freezing panes is a view setting, not a formula, so there is nothing to mark. What pays off next to it is moving around a large sheet quickly, and that you can practise right now in the browser:

• Cell selection shortcuts, for getting to the edge of a block without scrolling.
• Larger cell selections, for grabbing a whole range in one go.
• Row and column selections, the two that pair with a frozen header.
• Arrow keys, the foundation the rest of it is built on.

Or start at the full list of Excel exercises.