Imagine you have a dataset with a dozen columns, but you only need five of them, and they’re scattered across the sheet like breadcrumbs. You might hide a few columns, drag others into place, or even copy and paste the five columns into a new tab just to focus on them there. You can go through all of that effort, or you can use a single formula to pull exactly the columns you need in the order you want, without any extra messy Excel sheet cleanup. Since I mastered CHOOSECOLS, I’ve stuck with that approach. Precise column selection A clean way to pick and reorder columns in one step Screenshot by Ada CHOOSECOLS lets you extract specific columns from a data range and return them in whatever order you need, even if those columns are not sitting next to each other in your dataset. The syntax is easy to remember: =CHOOSECOLS(array, col_num1, [col_num2], …) The array is your source data range, while col_num1 is the index of the first column you want to pull and …