Transpose an Excel table
Upload your sheet and download it rotated: what was in rows becomes columns and the other way round.
What it is for
Transposing helps when you receive data in the opposite orientation to the one you need: twelve months down the rows when your report wants them across, or a long narrow list that reads better wide.
In Excel you do it with "Paste Special → Transpose", but that means copying, picking a destination with enough room, and deleting the original. Here you upload and download.
Transposing is NOT unpivoting
This is the most common confusion and worth getting straight:
- Transposing rotates the table. If it was a cross-tab, it stays a cross-tab.
- Unpivoting restructures the data so that each row is one observation.
If your goal is to analyse with a pivot table, what you need is unpivoting, not transposing.
The width limit
When transposing, each row becomes a column. A 200,000-row table would produce 200,000 columns, and Excel supports 16,384. The tool checks first and warns you rather than generating a file that cannot be opened.
Frequently asked questions
Are numbers and dates preserved?
Yes. Every cell keeps its type: numbers stay numbers and dates stay dates.
What happens to the column titles?
They become the first column of the result, which is what lets you still know what each value was.
What about formulas?
The computed value is transposed, not the formula. A rotated formula would point at the wrong cells.
Can I transpose a CSV?
Yes, and a legacy .xls too. The result comes back in the same format, except .xls, which is delivered as .xlsx.