If I asked you which Excel tab you use most, there’s a good chance the View tab wouldn’t even cross your mind. The Insert, Formulas, and Data tabs usually get all the attention, and for good reason. Yet, the View tab might be the difference between wrestling with your spreadsheets and working with them effortlessly.
The standard Excel view doesn’t make it easy to navigate wide tables, multi-tab models, or webs of interconnected formulas. When you’re dealing with that much information, focusing on the right details at the right moment becomes a real challenge. Fortunately, Excel already gives you the tools you need—you just have to turn them on.
Freeze Panes and Focus Cell
Never lose track of where you are
Imagine you’re working on a spreadsheet with 50 columns and 5,000 rows. You scroll right to check a calculation, then scroll down to verify some data. Naturally, your headers vanish, and your column labels disappear. To make sense of whatever you were trying to confirm, you end up scrolling back and forth far more times than you’d like.
Freeze Panes in Excel solves this problem completely. It locks specific rows and columns in place so they remain visible no matter where you scroll. To set it up, go to the View tab, highlight the cell just below the rows you want to keep visible and just right of the columns you want locked, and click Freeze Panes twice. Now you can move freely around your sheet, and the selected rows and columns will stay put.
Basically, Freeze Panes locks everything above and to the left of the selected cell. So, if you want your first four columns and first seven rows frozen, select cell E8 (fifth column, eighth row) before applying the command. If you need to make changes later, just return to View -> Freeze Panes -> Unfreeze Panes. Just keep in mind that Excel only allows one frozen section at a time, which means you’ll have to unfreeze and refreeze it if you want to adjust it.
Alongside Freeze Panes, I also rely on Focus Cell, one of Excel’s newer features. It highlights your active cell’s entire row and column so you always know where you are. You can customize the highlight color and toggle the feature on and off under View -> Focus Cell, or with the shortcut Alt + W + E + F (though that one’s a bit too long for my liking). By default, Excel auto-activates Focus Cell during Find & Replace to help you locate results faster, though you can change that in the Focus Cell menu by toggling off Show Auto-Highlight.
I didn’t know these Excel functions existed, but now I can’t live without them
I wish someone had told me about them sooner.
Split View
Compare distant parts of your sheet side-by-side without scrolling
Freezing sections is incredibly useful, but there’s only so much you can freeze before it stops being helpful. When you need to see two distant areas of your worksheet at once, Split View offers a far better solution. It lets you divide your worksheet into separate panes so you can scroll in one while keeping the other stationary, whether side-by-side or top-and-bottom.
Setting it up follows the same logic as freezing panes. For a horizontal split, which works well when you want to compare the top and bottom sections of a sheet, select the row just below where you want the top pane to end, then open the View tab, go to the Window group, and click Split (the icon that looks like a box with a horizontal line). For a vertical split (left and right comparison), select the column to the right of where you want the divider and apply the same command.
You can also split the sheet in both directions by clicking the cell that sits below the rows you want divided and to the right of the columns you want divided. This is the option I use most often because having four panes in one sheet gives me the full picture without constant scrolling. And whenever you want to return to a single view, click Split again.
My 6 favorite Excel features that almost nobody talks about
I use these so much, I forget they’re not common knowledge.
Watch Window
Track the values that matter without jumping between sheets
Now, imagine you’re working on a complex financial model. You’re adjusting inputs on a balance sheet, but you need to see in real-time how those changes affect your net cash flow calculation on a completely different sheet. Switching back and forth is not only exhausting but also increases the odds you’ll miss something important.
Instead of the back-and-forth, you can use Excel’s Watch Window. It’s an auditing tool that lets you monitor specific cells in real time across multiple Excel sheets or even multiple workbooks. You can update numbers on Sheet2 while keeping an eye on cash flow, totals, test outputs on Sheet3, or even key formulas from another open valuation workbook. Everything stays visible while you work.
To set it up, go to the Formulas tab and select Watch Window in the Formula Auditing group. Choose the cells you want to track, click Add Watch, confirm the selection, and that’s it. From that point on, any change to those cells appears instantly in the Watch Window. It shows the workbook and sheet names, cell references, current values, and the formulas being used, which is everything you need to audit your work with confidence.
You can dock the Watch Window to the top, bottom, left, or right of your screen by dragging the pane to your preferred edge, or you can keep it floating if that feels more like you.
You can track cells that reference other workbooks as long as those files are open.
Large sheets stop feeling overwhelming once you master these views
Each of these features gives you a different kind of visibility, and when you use them together, they dramatically reduce the cognitive load of navigating large workbooks. They help you maintain context, stay oriented, and move through your data without any friction.
Once these views become part of your everyday toolkit, even the biggest spreadsheets stop feeling like a maze and start feeling manageable. They let you work faster, think more clearly, and catch errors earlier. So, the next time you open a complex workbook, head straight to the View tab. You’ll notice the difference immediately.