Q. Every now and then, after working on a spreadsheet for some time, I realize it would work better if I transposed the rows and columns—just rotating the data by 90 degrees. It’s a lot of trouble transposing the information, so usually I just plod along. But since Excel can do so many things, it occurred to me there may be an easy way to do that, too.
A. Your intuition is on the mark. Excel indeed has an easy way to transpose data. Let’s say you have this simple table:
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You want to move the months to the left column and place the geographic areas along the top. Highlight the range of cells you want to transpose and copy (Ctrl+C) it to the clipboard. Then right-click your mouse, click on Paste Special and the following menu appears with the Transpose box on the bottom:
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| Click in the Transpose box and the table spins 90 degrees. |
Click in the Transpose box, OK , and presto:
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