How to Move Rows in Excel (3 Fast & Easy Methods)

🖋️ By Kasper Langmann, Certified Microsoft Office Specialist. 📅 Updated on February 13, 2024.

Knowing how to move rows in Excel is as important as knowing how to copy and paste – it’s essential.

This is something you’d have to do almost all the time while you work in Excel.

So what are you waiting for? Dive into the guide below where we have listed the 3 best ways to move rows in Excel🚀

Also, to tag along with the guide, download our free sample workbook here.

Method #1: Using the Shift key

This one’s easy!

Simply select the row you want to move, press shift, and drag it to the new position.

Let’s see an example here:

Moving row 6 to row 2

In the dataset above, the 6th row comes in the wrong order. It should have been in the first position (Row 2).

No worries – let’s move it to the right place. For that:

  1. Select the relevant row number (in our case, row 6).
Selecting entire row
  1. Hover over the edge of the row until the plus sign appears.
  2. Press down the Shift key and drag the entire row to its new location.
  3. The selected row moves up, and the result looks like this:
Moving row 6

You can do the same for multiple rows by selecting them at once and dragging them to the new position.

Method #2: Using the insert, cut, and paste hack to move rows

You know this one already, don’t you?

It’s an easy hack, and you just need to follow these steps.

  1. Select the new row where you want the previous row to be moved. In this case, we want to move row 5 above row 9.
Moving row 5 above row 9
  1. Once selected, open the context menu with a right-click.
  2. Select the Insert option to add a single row.
Adding new column
  1. A new blank row appears above the 9th row.
New row inserted
  1. Cut row 5 by selecting it and pressing the Control key + X.
Cut row
  1. Go to Row 9 (the newly inserted blank row).
  2. Paste Column 5 in there by pressing Control + V.
Green border around new row

Now that all the data is organized, we have an empty row (Row 5) in our dataset.

You might want to delete it as follows:

  1. Select row 5 and right-click on it to launch the context menu.
  2. From the context menu, choose the Delete option to delete the subject row.
Deleting empty row
  1. This is what your dataset looks like now:
Final result

Method #3: Using the CTRL Key

You can also rearrange rows using the Control key.

Here’s how to do that:

  1. Select the row to be moved.
  2. Press and hold down the Control key.
  3. Hover over the row until you see a plus sign.
  4. Drag the row to its new position.
  5. The new row will appear, and the previous row will be replaced.

That’s it – Now what?

In this article, you’ve learned 3 easy methods to moving rows in Excel🔰

Very related to this is, of course, to move columns!

There are tons of other things to Excel that you’d want to learn. And you can start by practicing with some core Excel functions like the VLOOKUP, IF, and SUMIF functions.

Enroll in my 30 minutes free email course today to learn these functions (and more!).

Other resources

If you enjoyed reading this article, we bet you’ll love reading our other blogs too.

Some of these include Deleting Blank Rows, Sorting Data, and Filtering Data in Excel.