Thank You, Transpose formula!

I bet you’ve been here: Hundreds of tables to be downloaded from the internet, and a report that has to be delivered yesterday. It has got to be error-free, of course, along with being well formatted, neatly laid out and in a standardized layout that brooks no exceptions. And you’ve just about finished figuring out all your data sources, and are getting ready to prepare the final report when you notice (dear me!) that your base data files has data in this layout:
 

And of course the standardized layout requires them to be laid out top to bottom, rather than left to right.

Much weeping, and perhaps an occasional joust of head butting with the wall – that would be the standard response, right?

Wrong! Not when your friendly spreadsheet software with the comforting green logo is around – this sounds like a job for Microsoft Excel.

For the Transpose function within Microsoft Excel, actually.

Doing this using the transpose function is just a little bit tricky, but pay a little attention, and you should be able to pull this rabbit out of the hat! First up, select a range of cells that does not overlap with the original range – make user that the dimensions are the same as the original, but reversed.

In other words, there are two rows and twelve columns here, so your new range should have two columns and… you guessed it… twelve rows.

Enter the following formula (you want to, of course, adjust the numbers shown to suit your requirements)

And what you get is the following:

Umm, whoops. That didn’t quite work out, now did it? But hey, help’s only a click away. Selecting the forst column, and formatting the cells in the data format will have you with your data just the way you wanted.

And off you go! That should help you get home on time after all.

There’s a much, much easier way to do this as well – it involves using some nifty Paste Special commands – and that’s what we’ll talk about the next time around. In the meantime, feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below!