There are basically two ways of inserting rows in excel. The first is done primarily with your mouse / touch pad and mouse whilst the second is done with the keyboard.
Inserting Rows with Mouse / Touchpad
Inserting rows with a mouse or touchpad in excel is very easy if you follow these steps:
Step 1: Select a row, this should be the row you want to appear after the newly inserted row.
Step 2: Right click and click on insert
Step 3: You should see a new blank row on row 2 (Initially selected row).
Note: If you want to insert 2 or more rows, just count the number of rows down when highlighting and go through the process above. For example assuming we need to insert 2 rows, we would select those rows as shown below:
Now we can proceed with right clicking and clicking on insert as detailed above.
Inserting Rows with Shortcuts
Inserting rows with shortcuts is faster than the normal method and as an analyst handling various worksheets and maintaining numerous models, knowing how to insert rows with keyboard shortcuts would be very useful and can save you some time.
Step 1: Navigate to a cell on the row number you want the inserted row to appear and hit Shift + Space bar (please note that the + is just to specify the order) to highlight that row. You can increase the number of rows highlighted by holding down the shift key and pressing the down arrow key
Step 2: After highlighting the rows, use the following combination: CTRL SHIFT +
You should see a result similar to the result in the image below.
Insert Cells (Shift Cells down)
You may want to push the content of a cell down a row or few without affecting content in nearby columns of the same row. Doing this is as easy as the previous guide, just follow these steps:
In our previous example, let’s pick A2. We want the number 50 to be pushed down to cell A3 without affecting the number 30 presently position by the right of number 50.
Step 1: Navigate to cell A2 and press the combination CTRL SHIFT +, this would pop out an insert cells dialog box because the entire row was not selected.
Step 2: Select shift cells down and click on OK
Step 3: You’re done, see the result below
Notice that excel also gives you an option to insert entire row. If you want to insert a row rather than shift cells down, just select that option and click on OK.
The result:
