How to Move Up and Down in Excel (5 Easy Methods)

While working in excel, we often need to move some cells up or down. Moreover, we may sometimes need to move an entire row up or down the spreadsheet. To know how to move up and down in excel, read this article carefully.

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5 Useful Methods to Move Up and Down in Excel

In this section, we will demonstrate 5 effective methods to move up and down in Excel with relevant examples. Here we have a table containing the Names, Student IDs, and Groups of 10 students.

Now, if we need to move any single cell or an entire row up or down, we can follow the methods mentioned below.

1. Use Shift Key and Mouse to Move Up and Down

This is the simplest method to move cells or rows up and down. For illustration, we will first move the last row to the top. Follow the steps mentioned below.

Steps:

• Select the last row.

• Bring the mouse cursor to the top edge. Here, you should notice the Move Icon, which looks like a four-directional arrow icon.

• Now hold the Shift key and drag it up to the top until you see an icon like this in the figure below.

• Now drop the selected row. You will see that the selected row has come to the top, and the other cells have dropped just 1 cell below.

Read More: How to Move Data from Row to Column in Excel (4 Easy Ways)

2. Utilize Insert Copied Cells Command to Move Up and Down

Another good way to move cells is to use Copy and Insert Copied Cells commands. Suppose we want to move the cell D10 cell to D6. in the previous example We need to follow the steps below:

Steps:

• Select the D10 cell and, go to Home Tab, select Copy.

• You can also do the same task by typing ctrl+C.
• Now select the D6 cell and press right-click on the mouse. You will see a dialogue box like below. Here, you have to choose Insert Copied Cells.

• After selecting the command, you will see another window like this.

Here select Shift cells down and click OK. You will have the following result.

• Here we can see that cell D6 has been replaced with D10. Also, the cells below D6 have been downed by one. Hence the value in D13 has come to Cell D14.
• But as we don’t need the value in D14, we have to delete it.
• After deleting it, we get our final result.

You can also use this method to move multiple adjacent cells simultaneously.

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3. Utilize Insert Cut Cells Command to Move Up and Down

An alternative way (perhaps even better) to move cell is to use the Cut and Insert Cut Cells commands. In this method, you don’t even need to delete the last cell, unlike the previous method, as it is automatically done by excel itself.

Steps:

• Select the D10 cell, go to Home Tab, and select Cut

• You can also press ctrl+x to cut the cell.
• Now, select cell D6 and Right Click on the mouse. A menu will appear like the below figure.

• Now select Insert Cut Cells. Then, you will get the exact similar result as the final result of method 2.

4. Delete Specific Cells to Move Up and Down in Excel

If you have empty cell(s) in your list, you can move cells up/down by deleting the empty cell(s). For example, in the list below, there are two blank cells.

Now we want to move the non-blank cells up. To do this, follow the steps below:

Steps:

• Select the blank cells C4 and C7. (For multiple selections, hold the ctrl key and Left Click on the cells to be selected after selecting the first cell.)
• Right-click on the mouse. A menu will appear. On the menu, select

• Here, a new menu will pop up like this.

• Select Shift cells up and click Then you will see the following result.

• This method can also move rows in a table like the previous methods.

Read More: How to Show Menu Bar in Excel (2 Common Cases)

5. Use Goto Special Feature to Move Up and Down in Excel

If you have a large number of data, manually selecting blank cells will be challenging. Excel offers an easy way to find out empty cells, that is Goto Special Feature. After finding the blank cells, you can delete them to move cells up or down, whichever you like. Here is an example of a list that contains some empty rows.

Follow the steps below to delete the blank cells and move the other cells.

Steps:

• Firstly, select the whole table.

• Now click the f5 button, and a window will appear like this.

• In the window, select Then a new pop-up will appear like this

• Now, select Blanks and click You will see that all the empty cells in the selection are being highlighted.

• Now right-click on the selection and select Delete.

• A new dialogue box will pop up like this.

• Select Shift cells up and click OK. You will see the following result.

Read More: Descriptive Statistics – Input Range Contains Non-Numeric Data 

Things to Remember

• Method 4 and 5 are only applicable if you have blank cells in your list.
• Method 5 is most efficient for a large set of data. For a small quantity of data, Method 4 is more efficient than method 5.
• For a set of data that doesn’t contain a blank cell, methods 1,2, and 3 can be applied. But method 1 is the most efficient for small data quantity.
• Between methods 2 and 3, method 3 is faster.

Conclusion

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