How to make persistent headers in Excel

Last Updated on May 17, 2017 by Dave Farquhar

My boss and I are compiling a huge Excel spreadsheet that summarizes everything our organization has ever done. It’s as big of a pain as it sounds. What makes it worse is having to scroll all the way back to the beginning to view the headers. The solution: make persistent headers in Excel.

The trick to making a persistent header that shows all the time, even after scrolling, hides in the View tab in Excel 2007.

Click View, then click Freeze Panes. There, you can choose from freezing whatever you have selected, the first row, or the first column.

And if for some reason you want to do the opposite and get rid of that header, click Freeze Panes, and one of the options will be to unfreeze whatever panes you previously selected.

Sometimes you may run into issues, like Excel not scrolling. The solution is to unfreeze the panes, then freeze again. The bigger the spreadsheet, the more often you have to do this.

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One thought on “How to make persistent headers in Excel

  • March 13, 2012 at 10:27 am
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    The guy hasn’t tagged them (grrr….), but over at
    http://voluntaryxchange.typepad.com/voluntaryxchange/excel/
    the author has posted, to date, 19 Excel tips, some of which were so good I remember the site for the day when I finally “upgrade” to something newer than Excel2003.

    Normally I wouldn’t mention this, but I seem to recall a few were really good.

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