Remove Blank Rows in Excel (Table of Contents)
Remove Blank Rows in Excel
- Remove blank rows is one of the most common tasks used in excel by a user when there is a bunch of blank rows or lines found throughout the file.
- Spreadsheets with blank rows or tabular data with blank rows look very odd & very annoying.
- If you need to get rid of a one or two rows in a tabular data, you can go through the manual process & delete them. But, if you have more than thousands of blanks rows in excel, it is very difficult to manual delete each blank lines or rows, it will be a painful and virtually impossible task.
Definition
Blank row means if the row cell is empty or blank which does not contain any text or numeric or logical values in a specific range of data or tabular data.
How to Remove Blank Rows in Excel?
Let’s look out how to remove blank rows in Excel.
There are 5 ways to remove blank rows in Excel.
- “Go to Special” method.
- Use Excel Filter Functionality.
- Use the sort by column method.
- Use Excel Find Functionality or removing Blank Rows with Find & Select method.
- Use of macros to delete blank rows in excel.
Example #1 – Go To Special Method
It can be used only when entire complete rows are blank in an excel sheet.
“Go to Special” method helps out to delete an entire row in excel.
This method is used when data appears like a below-mentioned screenshot.
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In the above-mentioned table, it contains employee name in column A, a product category in column B & sales in column C. I need to delete blank rows which are present in that tale range with “Go to Special” method in excel.
Select the entire table, Press function F5 key, “Go to” dialog box appears. click on ‘Special’.
“Go to special” dialog box appears, click the ‘Blanks’ radio button and press OK.
You can see all the blank cells selected immediately, where you’ll see all the blank cells or rows will be highlighted.
Now on the Home tab, In the cells section, click on Delete and then choose Delete Sheet Rows.
Note: while doing this process, you should not click anywhere on the sheet (otherwise your selection will be removed)
Now, you can observe, the entire unfilled rows will be deleted in the table.
Example #2 – Use of Excel Filter Functionality Method
It can be used only when entire complete rows are blank in an excel sheet. This method helps out to delete the entire blank rows in excel.
In the below-mentioned table, it contains employee name in column A, a product category in column B & sales in column C. I need to delete blank rows which are present in that table range with “EXCEL FILTER FUNCTIONALITY” method in excel.
Initially, I have to activate Excel data filter for data table in excel, select the entire data range or table range and click on the Filter button in the Data tab in the Excel ribbon.
Click (keyboard shortcut – Ctrl + Shift + L)
When you click on Filter, each column in the first row will automatically have a small drop-down button or filter icon added at the right corner of the cell i.e.
You’ll see a drop-down arrow appear next to each title in the header row. Click on employee name i.e. by applying the filter to the “employee name” column.
Once a filter is applied in “employee name” column, Excel pinpoints you that table is filtered on a particular column by adding a funnel icon to the region column’s drop-down list button.
Now, uncheck Select All and check only Blanks at the bottom.
Once you have applied filter, only the entire blank rows will be visible,
Then you can select and delete the entire blank rows in excel. The rows can be deleted by pressing the Delete sheet rows button on the cells of the Home tab of the ribbon.
The table will look like this:
Now you can clear the applied filter, by following below mention steps:
Go to the Data tab > Sort & Filter group and click Clear.
Now, you can observe, the entire unfilled rows will be deleted in the table.
Example #3 – Sort by Column Method
It is a is a simple and very effective way to delete blank rows in excel.
It can be used only when entire complete rows are blank in an excel sheet. This method helps out to delete the entire row.
In the below-mentioned table, it contains employee name in column A, a product category in column B & sales in column C. I need to delete blank rows which are present in that table range with “SORT BY COLUMN METHOD” method in excel.
Prior to this procedure, the first thing you have to do is, insert a column and number it consecutively with serial numbers. if you want the order of the rows in the same manner.
Usually, when we sort Column A to get rid of the blank lines, then it will be difficult to get the rows back in the order they were before sorting, therefore, we have to add serial numbers.
Now you select the data range or table including headers and click on the Data ribbon in Excel. Then click on the Sort button in sort & filter on the Data tab.
Sort option box appears, here you can sort by, employee name and then click OK.
Note: You have to sort the column that has the blank values in it.
After sorting data appears as below mentioned.
As you can see, in the above-sorted data, it’s very easy to delete the blank rows because they are all at the bottom i.e. serial no 2, 5 & 7, you can delete those entire rows.
After deleting the rows data will like this.
Once you delete the rows, now you can probably observe, why we added the column with the serial numbers in the beginning. Before sorting, the order of employee name was “John, Chris, saw” and now you can see, it is “Bret, Chris, Harry, etc.…”. Now you can sort again by serial numbers to get the original order back.
Our Final Table will look as below:
Things to Remember about Remove Blank Rows in Excel
- It’s always better to backup data (one set of copy in other sheets) prior to deleting a blank row with the above-mentioned methods in excel.
- Blank rows in the worksheets or tabular data will affect to carry out built-in Excel table tools or function such as sort, remove duplicates, subtotals and many others excel functions and to recognize your data range perfectly by others who use it.
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