Moving around a big file

Navigate, select, resize columns, freeze the ones you need, and reorder them.

You can use the keyboard to move around your data quickly.

Arrow keys move your selection one cell at a time.
Shift + Arrow keys extend your selection in that direction. Hold Shift and press an arrow key to select more cells.
Cmd + Arrow keys (Ctrl + Arrow on Windows and Linux) jump to the edge of the data in that direction. This works just like it does in Excel.
Cmd + Up and Cmd + Down go to the first and last row.
Cmd + L opens the Go to Row window. Type a row number and jump straight to it. This is much faster than scrolling when you have a file with 40 million rows.
Tab moves the selection one cell to the right after an edit.
Enter moves the selection one cell down after an edit.
PageUp and PageDown scroll one screen of rows at a time.
Home and End jump to the first and last column in the current row.

Selecting cells and ranges

You can select data to copy it or edit it.

Click a cell to select it.
Click and drag to select a rectangular range of cells.
Click a column letter in the header to select the whole column. When a column is selected, the status bar shows real aggregate stats computed over the entire file. You can see the count, sum, average, min, and max. This calculates over all data, not just visible rows.
Click the corner box at the top-left to select everything.
Shift + Click a cell to extend the selection. BigXL selects everything from your current cell to where you clicked.

Column width

You can adjust columns to fit your data.

Drag the divider between two column headers to resize a column.
Double-click the divider to auto-fit the column to its widest value. This ensures you can read the longest text in that column.

Freezing columns

You can freeze columns to keep them visible while you scroll. This is useful when you have a wide file. It helps you keep an ID or name column visible while scrolling to columns on the far right.

Right-click a column header and choose Freeze columns up to this one. Everything from the first column through that one stays pinned at the left edge. The rest of the data scrolls underneath.
A blue line marks the freeze boundary.
To undo this, right-click any header and choose Unfreeze columns.

Reordering columns

You can move columns to put related data next to each other.

Drag any column header to move it to a new position. This is recorded in the Timeline like any other change. You can always undo it if you make a mistake.

Reordering rows

You can also rearrange the order of your rows.

Drag row numbers to reposition selected rows. This is also recorded in the Timeline.

Editing a cell

You can change the data in any cell.

Double-click a cell, press F2, or just start typing to enter edit mode.
Press Enter to confirm the edit and move down. Press Tab to confirm and move right. Press Escape to cancel.
If you type something that starts with an equals sign, BigXL recognizes it as a formula. It will offer to turn it into a computed column instead. This happens because formulas in BigXL compute an entire column, not a single cell. See Formulas for more details.
Edits are recorded in the Timeline like everything else. A wrong edit is one undo command away from being fixed. Press Cmd + Z to undo.

Copy and paste

You can move data in and out of BigXL easily.

Cmd + C copies the selected cells as tab-separated text.
Right-click and choose Copy with headers to include the column names in what gets copied. This helps when pasting data into an email or presentation.
Cmd + V pastes clipboard text into the grid. BigXL parses tabs and commas in the pasted text and fills the cells accordingly.

Fill down

You can quickly repeat or increment values down a column.

Select a range of cells in a column and trigger Fill Down. BigXL copies the top value down the selected cells.
BigXL can detect a pattern like INV-001 and INV-002. If it sees a pattern, it auto-increments the values. Numbers increment by the detected step. Alphanumeric codes increment their numeric part. This saves time when generating sequence numbers.

Download BigXLFree for any file size. macOS, Windows and Linux.