How to Unpivot in Excel — Turn Wide Columns Into Tidy Rows

You get a report where each month (or product, or region) is its own column. It looks fine to a human, but it's useless for a pivot table, a chart, or a database. You need to unpivot it: turn those side-by-side columns into rows.

What "unpivot" actually means

This wide layout —

becomes this tidy long layout —

The month names move into one column, the numbers into another. Now it pivots, filters, and charts cleanly.

The painful ways to do it in Excel

• Copy-paste by hand. Tedious, error-prone, and hopeless past a few columns.
• Power Query → Unpivot Columns. It works, but you have to learn Power Query, and it's easy to forget the exact steps next month.
• An old PivotTable trick (multiple consolidation ranges). Buried, finicky, and barely documented.

The repeatable way, step by step

1. Open your wide file (CSV or Excel).
2. Add an Unpivot step.
3. Pick the columns to keep as-is (e.g. Region).
4. Pick the columns to fold into rows (e.g. Jan, Feb, Mar).
5. Name the two new columns (e.g. Month and Sales).
6. Save it as a recipe.

Do it in one click with Kramata

Kramata is a free desktop app where Unpivot is a single step in a reusable recipe. No M code, no formulas — just pick which columns stay and which fold, and you're done. Your data never leaves your computer.

• Plain-language step — no Power Query to learn.
• Reproducible — same file + same recipe = identical output.
• Batch — unpivot a whole folder of files at once.

Related

A simple Power Query alternative · Merge two spreadsheets without VLOOKUP

FAQ

Is this the same as Power Query's "Unpivot Columns"? Same result, in plain language, built for non-technical users.

Can I unpivot dozens of columns at once? Yes — pick them all to fold in one step.

What about the reverse (long → wide)? That's a pivot/group-and-summarize step, also available in Kramata.