How to Quickly Rearrange Column Order in Excel

hello and welcome back to tips and timesavers I'm Danny rocks in today's lesson I'm going to show you how you can sort by rearranging the columns in an Excel worksheet well many people say why would you want to do that well if you want to use for example the vlookup function you need a discreet field which is the employee ID in this case it could be a social security number or any other unique value field and you want to have that as the leftmost column in your data set now the normal approach that people will take is they'll come over and they'll say all right what I want to do is insert a blank column I'll come over here and I'll select this information and I'll cut it and I'll paste it over here well that's too many steps so let me show you a better way to accomplish this all right first thing we want to do is we want to insert a new row we want to insert a new row so I've selected by clicking over here on Row 1 I'm going to right mouse click and say insert and it's going to insert a new row now here is the order that I want to have the sort by I want to have the employee ID be in column a so I type in number one let's say that I want to have the department as column B and I want to have last name as column C first name as column four and over here I want to have the home phone as the fifth column the mobile phone as the sixth column and I'll leave everything else in place seven eight nine all right now what I want to do is I want to make a selection of the entire data set so I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut ctrl a to select all of the data on the data tab of the ribbon I want to come over here in the sort and filter group and choose sort what I want to sort by in the drop-down is I want to sort by Row 1 so that's why it's so important that you make a selection of the entire group so I want to sort by Row 1 and then I'm going to come up into the options over here in this case instead of the normal sort from top to bottom going down vertically I want to sort going across horizontally and I'm going to click OK and now when I click OK there you go so you see now that I have the employee over here in the leftmost column the department the last name first name etc etc of course now I can go through and I want to delete this extraneous column that I have over here so it's an easier way I feel to rearrange your column order instead of inserting a column copying or cutting and then pasting and then deleting so there are a couple of key steps in there you may want to watch this video two or three times just to go through and practice the techniques and I'll look for you in the next tips and time-savers

Channel: Danny Rocks

Views: 223,864

Rating: 4.7793379 out of 5

Keywords: Excel, Sorting Excel Data, Sort Horizontally

Id: LN_EV5IjCkM

Length: 3min 35sec (215 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 09 2014