# Tips, Tricks and Shortcuts in Fabric Notebooks

Notebooks in Fabric offer a rich development experience with many hidden tricks and features. Below are some of them that I have discovered which can be helpful during development.

### **Toggle the cell output layout**

You can change the layout to side-by-side or standard. Side by side will split the layout vertically.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1685125055002/9d0c47dc-2c77-47a5-8b10-c51e51770039.gif align="center")

### **Freeze A Code Cell**

If you want cells to be excluded from execution, you call click on the snowflake ❄️ in cell options. This is very helpful during development when you don't want certain cells to be executed again when the entire notebook is re-run.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1685125209699/feb6d9e1-e9ed-4870-9b72-47b6c2f3f937.gif align="center")

### **Lockdown A Markdown Cell**

Similar to freeze cells but for creating read-only markdown cells, just select the 🔒lock icon in the cell options.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1685125457821/d75462e3-99fb-43be-83a1-f1635cf56f69.gif align="center")

### **Embed Images From Your PC**

Just drag and drop the image from your PC to the markdown cell, it will automatically be embedded and uploaded to the lakehouse.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1685126112051/a760045e-8305-427e-a5c5-32b98032a462.gif align="center")

### **Global and Local Text Replacement**

* Global Find and Replace
    

To replace a text from the entire notebook, Edit > Find and Replace. You can also use the regex patterns for complex find operations

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1685126569856/13caf407-c59b-40be-a646-c084b1b46cef.png align="center")

* **Local (cell level) find and replace**
    
    Just highlight the word, right click > Change All Occurrences > start typing
    
    ![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1685126821179/0ef83aa9-9b59-4ac9-82bb-edebb3a04da9.gif align="center")
    
    If you need to do regex-based replacements, right click cell > Command Palette > Type Replace > Use Regex pattern
    
    ![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1685127030981/f9f91e2b-6ba1-4227-8cf2-56de22072421.gif align="center")
    

### **Change Text Case**

Highlight the text > right click > `lower`

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1685127430526/eaf21fe8-07dc-4d10-bf68-4e7588dbeab5.gif align="center")

### **Move Cells Up or Down By Dragging**

Grab the blue bar on the left and drag and drop

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1685127618737/dafffb07-938d-4cf1-9744-ee6d9320bb30.gif align="center")

### **Multiline Cursor**

Alt + click wherever you want to insert the cursor

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1685127926818/6fcc0857-544f-4aa0-9ebc-f3f8f81b8624.gif align="center")

### **Box Selection**

Shift + Alt to make box selections and edits

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1685128246181/30b75262-9490-456b-b858-adcf7d37b7f2.gif align="center")

### **Add Comments to revisit or bookmark a code block**

Currently you can't pin a cell to bookmark it, but as a hack you can add a comment to a highlighted code and then just click on the comment itself to quickly jump to that cell/comment. Really handy during development to leave yourself some notes.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1685128515740/8e095bb6-bcb4-46c1-adc6-bb12c6a59252.gif align="center")

### **Merge or split cells**

Select the cell options (three ellipses), and choose merge or split cells

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1685130430594/5c688551-ec7a-4368-a18a-9379ecd57b27.gif align="center")

If you know any more, please let me know!