If your Excel spreadsheet has a lot of empty rows, you can delete each one individually by right-clicking on them and selecting the command from the context menu Delete (Delete), but for a large table it will take a lot of time! There is an easier and faster way to delete blank columns or rows in Excel.
Let’s deal with empty lines first. Then we will remove the empty columns. This is done in almost exactly the same way.
Select the area of the Excel spreadsheet where you want to remove blank rows. It is important that the selection area includes at least one additional line above and below the ones you want to remove.
Press Find & Select (Find and highlight) in the section Editing (Editing) tab Home (Home) and in the drop-down menu select Go To Special (Select a group of cells).
In the dialog box Go To Special (Select group of cells) select item blanks (blank) and click OK.
All empty cells in the area you selected will be highlighted.
In section Cells. Cells. (cells) tab Home (Home) click Delete (Delete) and select from the drop-down menu Delete Sheet Rows (Remove lines from sheet).
All empty lines will be removed and the rest will be contiguous.
You can also remove empty columns in the same way. Select the area where you want to remove empty columns. It is important that the selection area includes at least one additional column to the left and to the right of those that you want to delete.
Repeat the same steps: press Find & Select (Find and highlight) in the section Editing (Editing) tab Home (Home) and in the drop-down menu select Go To Special (Select a group of cells).
In the dialog box Go To Special (Select group of cells) select item blanks (blank) and click OK.
All empty cells in the selected area will be selected. Since empty rows were removed earlier, empty columns appeared in our table.
In section Cells. Cells. (cells) tab Home (Home) click Delete (Delete) and select from the drop-down menu Delete Sheet Columns (Remove columns from sheet).
The same thing happened as with the rows: empty columns were removed, and the remaining data was located close to each other.
This method will help you quickly clear any Excel table from empty rows and columns and save a lot of time.
Translator’s Note: Although this material is a translation of a foreign article, in any case we are obliged to warn you. The above is a vivid example of how not to delete empty rows and columns in Excel. Use the option Go To Special (Select a group of cells) with great care, especially in situations such as described here. If you did not pay attention, then in the course of all the manipulations carried out by the author, the first row in the table was deleted, and he did not even notice it!