To freeze panes in Excel, go to the View tab and click Freeze Panes in the Window group. Choose Freeze Top Row to keep your headings visible, or Freeze First Column to keep the left column visible. To freeze several rows and columns at once, select the cell immediately below and to the right of the rows and columns you want to lock (for example C3 to lock rows 1 to 2 and columns A to B), then choose Freeze Panes. To undo it, click Freeze Panes > Unfreeze Panes.
Category: Microsoft Excel
To merge cells in Excel, select the cells you want to combine, go to the Home tab, and click Merge & Center in the Alignment group. Use the dropdown arrow for other options: Merge Across (merges each row separately), Merge Cells (merges without centring) and Unmerge Cells. Merging keeps only the value in the top-left cell and discards the rest, so it is best used for titles and labels, not for data you will sort, filter or analyse.
To create a drop-down list in Excel, select the cell, open the Data tab, click Data Validation, choose Allow: List, and either type your items in the Source box separated by commas or select a range that contains them. Click OK, and a small arrow lets users pick from the list instead of typing.
Copilot in Excel is an AI assistant built into Excel that can draft formulas from plain English, analyse a table of data for trends and outliers, create charts and PivotTables, and clean up data. It can’t handle messy, unstructured data, it needs a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, and its output always needs checking. Used well, it’s a genuine time-saver.
Excel keyboard shortcuts let you perform common tasks instantly instead of hunting through menus. The most useful include Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to copy and paste, Ctrl+Z to undo, Ctrl+Arrow to jump across data, and Alt+= to AutoSum. Learning even ten of them can save you several hours a week.