Transposing Your Data

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. Choose Paste Special from the Edit menu. Excel displays the Paste Special dialog box. (Click here to see a related figure.) (To display this dialog box in Excel 2007, display the Home tab of the ribbon and click the down-arrow under the Paste tool at the left side of the ribbon. Select Paste Special from the resulting menu.)
5. Select the Transpose check box.
6. Click on OK. Your data appears at the point you specified, 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 6). You can play with this method of pasting and select the method that is best for you.

You should note, as well, that Excel 2007 provides a handy shortcut unavailable in earlier versions of the program. Instead of selecting Paste Special in step 4, you could skip the Paste Special dialog box entirely by choosing Transpose from the Paste menu. (Very handy, indeed.)