My friend Theda and I were talking the other day about a project she’s working on where she has to reorder a lot of items into alphabetical order and, in some cases, an order which is not alphabetical.

While she is doing the project in Microsoft Excel there are, of course, difficulties in Excel in moving items around as Excel does not, by default, open up a row when you choose to move an item from one part of the worksheet to another – instead, Excel thinks you want to overwrite the target cells – as if!

There is, however, a way to do this which opens up the space for the new row and which closes up the space that you have just made available. To do this select an entire row or range of rows in Excel by clicking on the row number or numbers. Hold your mouse over the dark outline around the rows and hold the Shift key as you drag the rows to their new position. The empty space that you have created will be closed up and a new space will be created between the other two rows for your item.

Problem solved!

Helen Bradley