Transpose Rows and Columns

About transposing a table

Transposing is one of those operations that is trivial to describe and annoying to perform. Excel hides it inside Paste Special as a checkbox you have to remember exists, and its formula form is an array formula that must be selected at exactly the right size before it will commit.

This is the same operation with none of that. Paste the table, look at the result, take it back. It updates as you type, so you can see immediately whether the shape is the one you wanted.

Everything happens in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

How to use it

• Paste your rows straight from Excel, or upload a spreadsheet
• The transposed table appears immediately underneath
• Untick Show the first row as a header if the top row is data rather than names
• Copy it back to the clipboard, or download it as CSV or Excel

Copying puts tab-separated text on the clipboard, which is exactly what Excel expects — paste it into a sheet and it lands in cells, not in one column.

Ragged data is squared off first

Real pasted data is rarely a perfect rectangle. The last row is often short, because the person who made it stopped filling cells when they ran out of things to say.

Transposing a ragged grid naively produces a mess — the short row's missing cells shift everything after them. So the grid is squared off before it is turned: every row is padded to the width of the longest one, and the result is a true rectangle where every column lines up.

That means a 5×3 block always becomes a 3×5 block, whatever the input looked like.

What happens to the header row

A header is just the first row, so transposing turns it into the first column — the names that ran across the top now run down the left. That is nearly always what you want, because the names still label the same data; they have simply changed direction with everything else.

The one thing to watch is what arrives in its place. The new header row is built from what used to be the first column, so if that column held values rather than names, your new column headings will be values too — 2024, 2025, 2026 instead of Year. That is correct behaviour rather than a mistake, but it is worth a glance before you send the result on to something that expects real names.

If the top row is data and not names at all, untick the header box. The table is then transposed as a plain block of cells with nothing treated specially.

What people use it for

• A report that came out wide when the next tool needs it tall
• Turning a row of monthly headings into a column you can sort
• Reshaping a small table to fit a slide or a document the other way round
• Fixing an export that put records in columns instead of rows
• Getting a single row of values into a column for a formula
• Preparing data for a chart that expects the other orientation

Good to know

• Works on Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS, and on phones and tablets — it takes pasted text or a file, not a folder
• Nothing is uploaded. Reading and transposing both happen in the page
• Dates stay dates. Cells are read with their real types, so a date does not come back as a serial number like 45231
• The preview shows the first 200 rows; the download always contains every one
• Transposing twice returns the original table exactly, which is a quick way to check the result
• The Excel download is a real .xlsx, not a CSV with a changed extension — formulas are not preserved, only values

Related tools

• Split & Combine Columns — reshape the columns themselves
• Unpivot Data — the other way to turn a wide table into a tall one
• Excel to CSV — change the format rather than the shape
• Text to Table — split pasted lines into columns first