In this session, I’m going to talk about rows and columns in Excel. In excel, it’s very often the case that you need to select the thing that you want to work on before you do something. In this case, we’re going to start by selecting rows and columns. We are going to look at ways of doing this with the mouse and the keyboard, including some shortcuts.

The Most Intuitive Way of Selecting a Column

Go up to selecting a column d and click the column. It’s then selected if you want to select several columns, hold the mouse key down and drag. It works exactly the same for rows. Click a row or hold the mouse key down. Select as many or as few rows as you like, and once you’ve made a selection, you will then have various alternatives on actions that you can perform on the column or the row.

The second way to select rows and columns in Excel is using the keyboard. Let’s just say that the active cell is cell d5.

Suppose I want to select an entire row press shift and spacebar. If I then want to change the size of that selection, I can hold the shift key and use the up arrow or the down arrow. Alternatively, to select various rows, select some cells and press shift plus spacebar. Now, you can see the entire row is selected for all of those cells that select exactly the same for columns except this time.

It’s a ctrl spacebar, and again I could select several cells with a control spacebar. Now, to cover the insertion and deletion of entire columns and rows, firstly select an entire column by right click on the mouse and click on insert. If I want to delete that with the same column highlighted right click and delete.

It can do the same on the ribbon with insert and delete, although on the ribbon. Now, you have some options with the drop-down. You can also use a shortcut key, which is ctrl plus and control minus. If you want to insert more than one column, then highlight two columns.

Use Shortcut Keys

Use the control plus to keep it quick, and you’ll see that two columns are inserted and control minus to remove. The rule is that we’re always going to insert the columns to the left of the selection, and with rows, it’ll always be above the selection.

Select two rows, right-click, and insert. This time just use the delete option from the ribbon; what happens if we don’t have entire rows or columns selected. For example, we just have a range, for example, c6 to e6; if I then right-click and insert Excel, ask me if I want to move these cells down. Is it just these three cells that I want to insert, or do I want to insert an entire row?

So, for example, the entire row will get the same effect ctrl z to undo insert. This time shift cells down, and I’ve shifted the cells down so. This can be very useful if we just want to shift part of the table down without moving everything in that row down.

Use Ribbon to Edit

If I click on insert, the dialog box hasn’t come up. It’s just automatically inserted those rows, so you just need to be a little bit careful when we’re using the ribbon ctrl z to undo using the ribbon. If we look at this drop-down, we can see that there are also options to insert entire rows and entire columns.

The same goes for deleted; we’ve been talking a lot about inserting and deleting, but the delete key on the keyboard just quite simply deletes the content of cells. So, here a highlighted range hit the delete key. Those contents are cleared; now, I want to take a look at column width.

If you want to set the column width, click on the column letter and hovering off to the right. You will see a vertical line with arrows pointing left and right. You can use this vertical slider to change the column width up or down alternatively.

If you want to set the column width for the widest cell in the column, just double click when you’ve got this vertical black line with the left and right arrows. Excel will optimize the column width.

How to Optimize Column With Shortcut Keys

If you just want to optimize the column width for the titles, highlight the titles and use this shortcut or not such shortcut alt h o I. Excel has optimized so that you can read the titles, but there may be cells where you’ve got too much space or too little space to be able to see. It works exactly the same with rows here.

To select several rows and this time, we get the horizontal black line with arrows on down, and we can drag up all down to set the row height. You will probably find yourself fiddling around less with rows than columns.

It is because if you keep the same font normally, you won’t need to change the row height another way to set row height. And column width is to use the ribbon with several cells selected. Let’s just go up to format, click on the down arrow, and we can see we have options.

For example, We also have auto-fit row height. So, if you change the row height here manually, go back into the format; it can then auto-fit row height.

How to Hide & Unhide Row & Column

It will reset it to the correct row height. There are similar options for column width and to fit column width as well. To look at the various ways to hide and unhide rows and columns in Excel, firstly, select several cells, then shift space to select the entire row and right-click hide to unhide.

Select the rows above and drag the mouse to the row below. Then right-click and unhide, we can do the same thing with the ribbon, but we don’t even need to select the entire rows this time. We can just select some cells and go up to format on the ribbon and hide or unhide.

Hide rose again if we select cells above and below. We can go to format hide and unhide rows. This time let’s select several rows, and the shortcut key is control nine. So, the rows are now hidden to unhide, and we have a shortcut key control shift, and then we have the rows unhidden.

It works much the same with columns, and you can use the ribbon. You can use right-click, so let’s highlight a couple of columns, and we’ll just right-click to hide those columns again.

You need to select the columns on either side of the hidden ones to unhide them. Right-click to unhide as we also have the ribbon option format. I do not hide columns, and I’m just going to ctrl z to undo this quickly. The final option that we have is to use shortcut keys.

This time it is ctrl zero to hide. In this version of Excel, we need to use ribbon-based shortcuts to unhide alt O C U. Finally; I’m going to show you grouping and ungrouping. This is really just another way to hide and unhide rows and columns in Excel.

Firstly, I’m just going to bring this data together; it’ll make it easier to show this. So, control minus to gets rid of those two columns; I’m now going to highlight most of the columns here.

Form Group With Ribbon

To click on the group in the ribbon, we now have these columns grouped so we can click on the minus to hide all those and click on the plus to reveal them again. We can have layers of grouping, so I’m going to select a subset of those columns and click on the group again. This time we have various levels of being able to see columns; if I click on one, it will hide everything that’s grouped, but if I click on two, it’ll show the next layer, and if I click on three, it’ll show all the layers.

If we want to ungroup, highlight the columns and click on ungroup, and here we go. I’m going to click on the group again, so this works the same for rows. Thank you!