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How to group rows in Excel, and what the guides leave out

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 25 September 2026 · 15 min read

How to group rows in Excel: select the detail rows, leave the grand total out of the selection, and go to Data, Outline, Group, Group, then Rows. Excel calls the result an outline and it goes eight levels deep. The rest of this page is the part the menus do not tell you.

The first thing worth knowing is that Excel does not really have a “group rows” feature. It has an outline, and grouping rows is one thing an outline can be built from. That matters because it explains the menu path, which reads Data › Outline › Group rather than anything with the word rows in it, and because it explains the ceiling: Microsoft writes that “you can create an outline of up to eight levels”, where each inner level shows the detail behind the level above. You can outline rows, columns, or both at once.

1. Check the shape of the data first. Microsoft asks for three things before you start: a label in the first row of each column, similar facts down each column, and no blank rows or columns inside the range. A stray empty row is enough to put the brackets in the wrong places.
2. Decide where your subtotals sit. “By default, Excel looks for summary rows below the details they summarize.” If yours are above, go to Data › Outline, open the dialog box launcher, and clear Summary rows below detail before grouping anything. Microsoft puts this setting before any grouping.
3. Select the detail rows, and leave the grand total out. The table above is Microsoft’s own list of what goes in the selection and what does not.
4. Go to Data › Outline › Group › Group, choose Rows, and select OK. There is a shortcut hiding in this step: “If you select entire rows instead of just the cells, Excel automatically groups by row — the Group dialog box doesn’t even open.”
5. For a nested level, repeat inside the group. Select the detail rows next to a summary row, and this time do not select that summary row. An outline goes up to eight levels.
6. If the numbers and the +/− marks do not appear, turn them on. File › Options › Advanced, then under the display options for the worksheet tick Show outline symbols if an outline is applied. Nothing is wrong with the outline; it is being drawn invisibly.

There is a faster route, and Microsoft gives it on the same page. If your data already has subtotal formulas under each block, you do not have to select anything: Data › Outline › Group › Group, then Auto Outline, and Excel reads the formulas and builds the brackets itself. The Subtotal command does both jobs in one move — it “inserts the SUBTOTAL function immediately below or above each group of detail rows and automatically creates the outline for you”. Hand-grouping is for data that has no subtotals to read.

Now the question people arrive with once the brackets exist. The next thing anybody wants to do with grouped data is sort it — rank the departments by spend, put the busiest month at the top — and the immediate worry is whether the detail rows will be torn away from the subtotal they belong to. It is a fair worry, and Microsoft’s outline page does not settle it: the word sort does not appear on it once. The same question was asked in Microsoft’s own Excel forum in June 2023: “How do I group multiple lines such that on Sort of the worksheet, the multiple lines stay together?”

The answer is on a Microsoft page, just not the one about outlines. Accelerate Excel, a blog run by the makers of an Excel add-in, puts it in one line: “Excel automatically keeps each detail block with its subtotal while it sorts.” Microsoft says the same thing on “Sort data in a range or table in Excel”: “When you sort rows that are part of a worksheet outline, Excel sorts the highest-level groups (level 1) so that the detail rows or columns stay together, even if the detail rows or columns are hidden.” The last clause is the one that decides the collapsed case, because a collapsed group is a group of hidden rows. The warning further down the same page — “hidden rows are not moved when you sort rows” — sits under a heading about unexpected results; the outline note is the more specific of the two.

One last distinction, because it decides which tool you want. Hiding rows and grouping rows look the same once the rows are off the screen, and they are not the same at all. A hidden row leaves a thin line between two row numbers and nothing else; a grouped one leaves a numbered level bar and a + button that says, plainly, that there is more here. Accelerate Excel calls hiding “a bad practice” for shared files for exactly that reason. If what you actually wanted was for the rows to be gone from view and stay gone, that is hiding rows, and it has its own failure modes.

Not covered here. It does not cover grouping inside a PivotTable, which is a different command on a different object: that is pivot tables.

It does not cover Google Sheets, where the equivalent is built on a different menu and has no Auto Outline.

And it does not recommend an add-in. Everything here is a menu in Excel, and where a source that sells one has been quoted, the page says so in the same sentence. What holds instead is simple: every step and every shortcut here is quoted from the Microsoft page that publishes it, with the date it was read.