Office 2007 Bible

Working with Rows and Columns

This section discusses worksheet operations that involve rows and columns. Rows and columns make up an Excel worksheet. Every worksheet has exactly 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns, and these values can’t be changed.

Note

If you open a workbook that was created in a previous version of Excel, the workbook is opened in “compatibility mode.” These workbooks have 65,536 rows and 256 columns. To increase the number of rows and columns, save the workbook as an Excel 2007 XLSX file and then reopen it.

Inserting rows and columns

Although the number of rows and columns in a worksheet is fixed, you can still insert and delete rows and columns if you need to make room for additional information. These operations don’t change the number of rows or columns. Rather, inserting a new row moves down the other rows to accommodate the new row. The last row is simply removed from the worksheet if it’s empty. Inserting a new column shifts the columns to the right, and the last column is removed if it’s empty.

Note

If the last row isn’t empty, you can’t insert a new row. Similarly, if the last column contains information, Excel doesn’t let you insert a new column. Attempting to add a row or column displays a warning dialog box shown. Click OK and then move or eliminate the contents of the nonblank cells to continue.

To insert a new row or rows, you can use any of these techniques:

• Select an entire row or multiple rows by clicking the row numbers in the worksheet border. ...