Shrinking tables and maximizing for easy display and data hiding in Microsoft Excle

Think of yourself as a presenter in next monthly sales review meeting at your organization. You have decided to present the data using Microsoft Excel and for that you already have created some graphs in the workbook. Now, you feel a bit uneasy as you probably have long list of data using which you have prepared the graph but in this instance it feels like a mess of Data behind the well decorated graph. And still you want to keep the data in the worksheet as you are thinking of keeping those as reference of the data in the workbook. Well, using Excel- you can easily compress the cells together and hid the details even though the reference stays intact. Let’s find the process to do it.

The process can be done in a computer which has Microsoft Excel installed in it. Moreover, to describe the process- here we are using Microsoft Excel 2010.

Step 1: Select the entire range of cells which you want to group up and compress.

Step 2: From the Excel Ribbon- select Data Tab.

Step 3: At the Data toolbar select Group option from the Outline portion of the toolbar.

Step 4: As the dialog box of Group Pops Up- Select any of the option (Column/Row) to compress the cells.

Step 5: Click on OK button of the box after selecting the compressing mode.

Step 6: Now the group has been activated already. Notice the button with a Minus sign on the left of the Row serial. Click on that to compress and hide the cells immediately.

Step 7: When the cells are in compressed and hidden state, you can find a plus sign on the left beside the row serial. Click on that to make the cells visible again.

Remember, when you are choosing the group in column or row category, all the cells of that particular row or column will be compressed and hidden together. So, stay alert when you are grouping the cells thus you can avoid grouping and hiding up the cells you don’t want to hide.