At the start of the month, we listed and provided a quick glance of the top 10 favorite posts related to Excel. On the list, announced by the official Excel blog, I found something missing – an age-old Excel trick that allows you to swap rows, columns or changes. So, here I am with a post on it.
You may have observed in Microsoft Office Excel you can copy or move the cells, rows, columns, or ranges as per your convenience. However, there appears no trick available for swapping the same. Not anymore! Excel, if you are not aware, supports a one-click operation to quickly swap rows, columns, or ranges, known as ‘Transpose’.
The feature works with all recent versions of Microsoft Excel.
Transpose feature in Excel
Here, if you see, I have created a spreadsheet in Excel in vertical orientation using a column style. We will proceed further and change the same into a horizontal row style. Here’s how.
From your Excel sheet, select the desired cells you would want to change.
Once done, Right-Click and select the ‘Copy’ option.
Next, right-click on an empty cell and choose Paste Options > Transpose as shown in the screen-shot below.
One of the highlights of Excel is that it will show you a preview of what the paste would look like before confirming the action.
If you do not see it, as an alternative step, you can Right-Click an empty cell and select ‘Paste Special’.
Then, from its window, you can check the ‘Transpose’ box and click OK.
You will now see your data transposed to a new layout style.
The same feature allows you to convert horizontal row data sheets into the vertical column style sheets too.
