How to Group Columns in Excel? (Method 1)

When working on an extensive Excel worksheet, you can avoid getting confused and overwhelmed by organizing columns into groups.

This will enable you to easily show and hide different areas of the worksheet so that only relevant data is visible.

In this tutorial, I will show you one of the three methods to?group columns in Excel.?

Method #1: Select the Columns to be Grouped and Apply the Group Command

When we use this method, we first select the columns that we want to group and then apply the Group command.?

The following dataset shows the sales of various tablets for three quarters.?

In the above dataset, I want to group all the columns between the?Tablet?column and the?Grand Total?Column (so that all the months and quarters sales data could be easily hidden with a click).

Below are the steps to group columns in Excel:

1. Select the columns by clicking the header of column B, holding down the mouse button, and dragging across the column headers to the header of column M.??

2. Select the?Data?tab, in the?Outline?group, click the downward arrow on the?Group?button and choose the?Group?option.

Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut?Shift + Alt + Right Arrow.

Level 1 outline is created as shown below (a gray line appears over the columns that have been grouped):

When you click the outline number 1 button in the top left corner (or you click the minus button in the top right corner), all the columns within the group are hidden, as shown below:

To unhide the columns, click the plus (+) button on top of the group.?

How to Create Inner Groups

In the above example, we have created only one outline where all the selected columns were grouped.

Now you can follow the same steps and create inner groups within the main group.

For example, in our data set, we have grouped all the month’s data together as the main outline, and then we can also create inner groups for each quarter.

Below is our dataset where we have a Level 1 outline where all the columns in between columns A and N are grouped.

We want to create an inner group of columns within this group.

Below are the steps to create an inner group of columns:

1. Select the columns we want to be included in the inner group. We want to include columns B, C, and D in this case.

1. Select the?Data?tab, in the?Outline?group, click the downward arrow on the?Group?button and choose the?Group?option.

Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut?Shift + Alt + Right Arrow.

The inner group is created:

Note that because only adjacent columns can be grouped, we will have to repeat the process for any other group we want to create.

We can group the three columns preceding the Q2 Total column and the three columns preceding the Q3 Total column in the same way.

We now have 2 levels of column groups:

• One outer level 1 group is made up of columns B to M.
• Three inner level 2 groups; columns B-D, columns E-H, and columns J-K.

To collapse all the inner groups, click the level 2 button on the left of the groups.?

To collapse each inner group click the minus (-) button on top of the group.