The Excel Freeze Panes tool allows you to freeze the headings of your dataset, which means you can scroll down or to the right and still see the headings.

The first step is to position your headings the way you would like to see them, before we lock them in place. Row 1 and column A don’t have to be on the screen. You may want to scroll down a bit to hide information at the top of the dataset (the first 6 rows in this example):

So just move down a few rows, to go from this…

no headings with header

To this…

position your headings

Now that our headings are positioned nicely, place the cursor just below and to the right of the information that you want to lock in. In the image above, with the cursor in cell B8, column A and row 7 will stay put as our headings.

Select the Freeze Panes function in the VIEW tab (or use the keyboard shortcut ALT,W,F,F):

freeze panes button

Now you can scroll around to your heart’s content and still see your headings! See how we’re all the way over in cell H69 but we can still see the headings in row 7 and col A? Neat!

scrolled down with headings

To get rid of the Freeze Panes, just click on the Unfreeze Panes button (the keyboard shortcut for this is also ALT,W,F,F):

unfreeze panes

Here’s a quick one minute video showing how it works.

I hope you find this useful. Share your thoughts in the comments below, I’d love to hear from you!