How to Insert Columns and Rows in Excel

This tutorial shows you how to insert columns and rows in Excel, using either the mouse or keyboard shortcuts to make things even faster. It also shows you how to move columns or rows of data quickly and easily.

Transcript:
In today's video, I'm going to show you how to insert rows and columns into Excel in two very easy ways, first using the mouse and the second using keyboard shortcuts. At the end of the video, I'm also going to show you how you can move existing data around by inserting it into a new location.

We're going to start with inserting columns using our mouse. Firstly, we need to decide which column we want to insert to the left of - that's the default behaviour for Excel. If, for example, I want to insert a column between our gold and silver medals, I come over to this area, I right click on the column header at the top and just select Insert from the menu that appears. You'll see my new column has appeared in between.

It's exactly the same process for rows, so we might decide that we want to insert a new row above row seven (and above is the default for inserting rows). Again, we right click on the seven and select Insert and you'll see it moved all of our data down and inserted that new row.

Using the mouse is probably what most people would do, however if you're entering a lot of data into Excel you might want to keep your hands on the keyboard and do these things with the keyboard shortcuts. Really easy shortcuts and again the behaviour is exactly the same in that it will insert a column to the left or a row above of the cell you're in.

If I want to insert a new column between silver and bronze medals, I can just click on bronze medals, press and hold the ALT key on my keyboard and then press in sequence I C for insert column and it's inserted a new column to the left of where our cell was selected. Again the same behaviour for rows: if we want to insert a new row 11, press and hold the ALT key then press I R for insert row so that's really useful if you don't want to take your hands off the keyboard and go to the mouse to do your insert.

At the start of the video, I did say I'd give you another quick tip on moving data so I'm just going to undo all our inserts just to neaten up our spreadsheet. Again, moving data around in Excel is really handy for a number of reasons: for example, we might decide that the key information we want from our Olympic Athletes spreadsheet is to know the number of medals in total that each athlete won in each Olympic year. So, what we need to do is select our Total Medals column by clicking on the J at the top and then we can either right click and cut or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL and X, which is common across all the Microsoft programs, and this has cut the data out of the position it's in and we're ready to move it. If we want to move it next to the year column we're going to click on our closing ceremony date column and when we right click on the column header you can see we've got a new menu item of Insert Cut Cells. If we select that, you can see that the Total Medals column has been inserted to the left of the Closing Ceremony Date.

Similarly, we can do exactly the same action with rows so if for example we want to move Alison Schmidt, we select her row and either use the keyboard shortcut CTRL and X or right click and cut and then we can select where we want to put her, again right click on the row that we want to put her above and Insert Cut Cells. And you'll see it's moved her data up without us having to worry about inserting a new row, copying the data and then deleting the old one.

As with inserting empty rows and columns, there are keyboard shortcuts to do this as well so I'm just going to undo those last two actions so we get back to where we started and then I'm going to do them again using the keyboard shortcuts. So I'm going to select my Total Medals column, I'm going to use CTRL X to cut it then I'm just going to arrow across to closing ceremony date, which is the column I want to insert it to the left of, and then I'm going to use the ALT I and E combination to insert the data that I copied. If I want to do the same with a row, I can just use my arrow keys to navigate to the row we want to move. Again we're going to go to Alison. I can use the SHIFT and SPACE BAR shortcut to select that row, the CTRL and X shortcut to cut the data and then I can move up to where I want to insert the row and again the command is ALT I then E to insert the cut data and you'll see that row's appeared where we want it.

I hope you found that useful. I find the keyboard shortcuts and the hints for moving data around really handy just to speed things up when I'm using Excel.

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