How to use Custom Views in Excel 2007/2010

If you work with Excel often, you would have come across situations where you have to modify the display of your worksheet several times in the course of working with your spreadsheet. For example, you may have laid out a spreadsheet with several rows and columns containing data. While you may need to display all the cells for a particular report, there may be another report where you have to hide a few rows or columns and also probably change the row height or column width. You could probably make the changes to the display, take a print out and undo the changes. But if you have to repeat it often it becomes tedious. Here’s another scenario. You may be editing a spreadsheet and working on a column far on the right and to makes things easy you may have frozen the pane or split the window. This is fine. But what if you have to work on the spreadsheet everyday or even several times a day. It would be a pain to do all these modifications again and again.
Here is where Custom Views could be the perfect solution.
Custom Views allow you to save changes to current position and magnification, column widths, row heights, print settings, frozen panes and more. Instead of repeatedly making these modification and changing them back, you can simple select your desired custom view and you’re there. Switch back to your normal view and you’re back to the default view.
How to create a Custom View?
Important: When you create a custom view, Excel does not automatically save a default or normal view. Hence, it is strongly suggested that before you make any changes to the spreadsheet, first create a custom view of the default spreadsheet. This would ensure that you always have a default view of the spreadsheet in case you want to make the changes from scratch.
Make a default view:

1. Make sure that your spreadsheet is in its standard or default view.
2. Click the View tab and select Custom Views.
3. Click Add.
4. In the Add View dialog box, enter a name. In this case it could be ‘default’ or ‘normal’.  Make sure that the Print Settings and Hidden rows, columns and filter settings checkboxes are checked.
5. Click Ok.
6. Save your document.

To create you custom view:

1. Make the changes to the spreadsheet display that you want to associate with this custom view like hiding rows or columns, changing the row height or column width, the magnification etc.
2. Click the View tab and select Customs Views. Thereafter, follow the same steps like what we did for creating a default view. Name your custom view appropriately.

To use your custom view:

1. Click the View tab and select Custom Views.
2. Select the desired view and click Show.

To return to the normal view, open up the list of Custom Views and select the default view that you created.
Once you start using Custom Views more and more, you will wonder, how you ever lived without it.