How to: Freeze Columns in the Windows Forms DataGridView Control

When users view data displayed in a Windows Forms DataGridView control, they sometimes need to refer to a single column or set of columns frequently. For example, when displaying a table of customer information that contains many columns, it is useful to display the customer name at all times while enabling other columns to scroll outside the visible region.

To achieve this behavior, you can freeze columns in the control. When you freeze a column, all the columns to its left (or to its right in right-to-left language scripts) are frozen as well. Frozen columns remain in place while all other columns can scroll.

The Frozen property of a column determines whether the column is always visible within the grid.

There is support for this task in Visual Studio. Also see How to: Freeze Columns in the Windows Forms DataGridView Control Using the Designer.

• Set the DataGridViewColumn.Frozen property to true.

  this.dataGridView1.Columns["AddToCartButton"].Frozen = true;
  

This example requires:

• A DataGridView control named dataGridView1 that contains a column named AddToCartButton.

• References to the System and System.Windows.Forms assemblies.

• DataGridViewColumn.Frozen
• DataGridView
• Basic Column, Row, and Cell Features in the Windows Forms DataGridView Control
• How to: Enable Column Reordering in the Windows Forms DataGridView Control