For Seniors: How to Insert and Delete Rows and Columns in an Excel Worksheet
Even if you’re a careful planner, you’ll likely decide that you want to change your Excel worksheet’s layout. Maybe you want data in a different column in your worksheet (also known as a spreadsheet), or certain rows turn out to be unnecessary. Excel makes inserting and deleting rows and columns easy.
Inserting a row or column
To insert a row or column:
Select the row above or the column to the right of where the insertion should occur. Or click in any cell in that row or column.
Choose Home→Cells and click the arrow to the right of the Insert button to open the drop-down list for the Insert button.
From the menu, choose Insert Sheet Rows or Insert Sheet Columns.
Here’s another way to insert: from the right-click (contextual) menu:
Select a row or column adjacent to where the insertion should occur.
Right-click the selection and choose Insert from the menu that appears.
Excel inserts either a row or a column, whichever you select in Step 1.
To insert multiple rows or columns at once, select a corresponding number of contiguous rows or columns in Step 1 in the preceding step list. For example, if you select three columns, you get three new blank columns when you choose Insert.
Deleting a row or column
Deleting a row or column works in a similar way:
Select the row(s) or column(s) you want to delete.
Choose Home→Cells→Delete.
The Delete button has a drop-down list, just like the Insert button does. From it, you can choose what you wanted to delete: cells, rows, or columns. However, in Step 1, you select what you want to delete, so that isn’t necessary in this case; you can simply click the button to delete what was selected.
