Microsoft Excel Essentials

The information on this page references the resource Party_Budget_Workbook_2 [XLSX, 11kB]. Download this workbook, if you haven’t already, and use it to work through the information below. This workbook has been formatted according to the instructions on the Getting started page of this module.

Occasionally you might find that you wish to transpose your data; that is, change the columns of your spreadsheet to rows and vice versa.

To do this, highlight the data you would like to transpose, (e.g. all of the Party_Budget data), and copy it (by right-clicking and selecting Copy or by pressing Ctrl + C). Next, choose where you would like to paste the transposed data (try adding a new sheet and renaming it, e.g. to Transposed_Data), then right-click on the cell in the top left-hand corner of where you would like to paste it (the A1 cell in your new sheet for example) and choose Transpose (T) from the Paste Options. That option looks like this:

Your data will be transposed, with the columns as rows and the rows as columns. It may look a little scary, with a row containing a lot of # symbols:

You just need to resize the columns to fit the data, in particular to view the dates in this example:

Don’t worry too much about formatting this spreadsheet now though as we will continue to use the original Party_Budget sheet for the remainder of the module, so ensure you have selected it again before moving on to VLOOKUP.