Understanding Custom Views in Excel

Excel is all about flexibility. With all the built in features there is just endless possibilities the way you can use this marvelous application software. But Excel extends the flexibility even further through custom features. And I recommend every Excel user to know all such features that come with word “Custom” because it put you at pace in productivity at your work with much ease that is not possible with regular features.

One of such great custom features is custom views. With this feature you can save your viewing environment. In simple words almost everything that you do in Excel and has anything to do with visuals than it can be saved in custom views so that you can revert back to same viewing experience again if you want for that worksheet.

With custom views you can save the following:

• Row height, column width, hidden rows and columns,
• selection of multiple cells, rows and columns
• active cell (active cell is basically selection but just one cell)
• Zoom level
• Freeze panes
• Horizontal and vertical window splitters
• Filters, and filter settings
• Show/hide grid lines, formula bar, headings.
• Window size and arrangement
• Print settings including margins, page orientation, scaling, print areas and others.

Creating custom views

As said above you can make different changes in Excel environment pertaining to its view in order to save such changes so that you can revert back to same view you have to create custom view. To do this follow given steps:

Step 1: Click View tab in the excel ribbon

Step 2: From workbook views group click Custom views button a dialogue box will optn

Step 3: Click Add… button and in the box that appears type in the name you want to give to that view, better is that you name it that relates to features of the view.

Step 4: From the top options “Include in View” you can choose to save or not the print settings and hidden rows, columns and filter settings. Having option checked save the corresponding information in the custom view

Step 5: Click OK

Step 6: Click Save file button

Once the file is saved with custom view saved in it then even if file is closed and reopened you can access custom view that was saved. Following animation walks you through above steps:

Applying Custom views

Once you have saved the custom views and afterwards made any changes but you desire to revert back to the view you saved then access the custom view button again as instructed in first two steps above. Once custom views dialogue box appears click Show and the custom view settings will be applied for you in no time.

Following animation shows the application of split view that we created (saved)  in above steps:

Change or delete Custom Views

You cannot make any changes to custom views you have already saved. For example if you have saved a view without saving print settings with it and now you want print settings to be saved as well then you cannot make this change. However, you can always save a new custom view at any time.

To delete the already saved custom view simply go to custom views dialogue box and select the view and click Delete button.

Caution:

• This feature is workbook specific and saves with the workbook for such custom views are created and cannot be used in other workbooks.
• If anywhere in the workbook table feature is used or contains table then custom views option deactivates eve if you have saved some custom views before, upon having tables inserted custom views feature won’t be available.