Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007 and 2010. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Quickly Transposing Cells.

Quickly Transposing Cells

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated June 21, 2021)
This tip applies to Excel 2007 and 2010


2

You probably know the feeling—you start creating a worksheet, get a good way into it, and realize that you should have made your columns into rows and your rows into columns. In other words, you want to turn your data by 90 degrees and continue working with the sheet.

Fortunately, Excel provides an easy way to accomplish this very task. In Excel's terminology, this process is known as transposing data. To transpose your data, follow these steps:

  1. Select the range of cells you want to transpose.
  2. Press Ctrl+C to copy the data from the worksheet and place it in the Clipboard.
  3. Select the cell that will be at the top-left corner of your newly transposed data.
  4. Display the Home tab of the ribbon.
  5. Click the down-arrow under the Paste tool and then choose Transpose. Your data appears at the point you specified in step 3, but it is transposed.

Notice that in step 2 you must use the copy command (Ctrl+C) rather than the cut command (Ctrl+X). This is because you can't choose Paste Special from the Edit menu when you cut information. For this reason, you may want to copy information from one worksheet (steps 1 and 2) and paste it into another (steps 3 through 5). You can play with this method of pasting and select the method that is best for you.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (6248) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007 and 2010. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Quickly Transposing Cells.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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What is five more than 8?

2016-12-04 22:30:48

David

I knew that, but I went a long time before I discovered the transpose function which does the same thing but means if you use the same data in rows in one place and columns in another you only have to update the data in one place.

What I sometimes find myself wanting to do is present the transposed data in the reverse order. Is there a way to do that easily?


2016-05-16 19:24:03

Thomson

If you will need to transpose similar data a lot (e.g. Daily/Weekly/Monthly report) , you can setup a PowerQuery for this.

Just load it into Power Query -> Transform -> Transpose.

The Pro is you can just refresh the queue if data always located in same location.




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