How To Delete Empty Rows In Microsoft Excel

Got annoying blank rows in your spreadsheet? Follow these simple steps to delete them in a few different ways. Follow ours teps to learn how.

Kevin Pocock

Last Updated on September 21, 2022

Excel is all about organization and efficiency, so having blank rows of data can be really annoying on a spreadsheet but commonly happens due to error.

There are actually quite a few different ways you can delete a row in Excel, a row being the horizontal group across a spreadsheet.

In this guide we will show you a few different ways to remove a row in Excel.

How To Delete A Row Manually

This step is easy to do when an empty row appears due to error or when you just spot a singular one.

Simply, hold Ctrl and then click on the row you wish to delete. The rows are often numerically ordered on the left axis of the spreadsheet, clicking this will highlight your whole row.

Only when the whole row is highlighted can you right click in the same place which brings up a drop down menu, one option should read ‘Delete’. Clicking this option will delete your whole row.

How To Delete A Row With Ribbon Command

Using a ribbon command you can also remove a row.

Simply highlight the row with the method instructed in the last step, simply selecting the row on the side bar.

From here go to the ‘Home’ tab and then click the ‘Delete’’ command which will open another drop down box. From this drop down menu simply select ‘Delete sheet rows’.

How To Delete Rows Using Keyboard Shortcut

For those who want efficiency, this keyboard shortcut can save lots of time. This same function will delete cells as well as rows.

In this situation, to remove a row, we want to select the row the same way we have ben doing, and then simply press both Ctrl + – together and they will delete whatever you have selected.

Using The ‘Go To’ Function

Like on Word, the ‘Go To’ function takes you to direct instances where a specific query has occurred. In this case, blank cells and rows.

Highlight the entire first column of data.

Press Ctrl + G to bring the Go To window. There should be an option called ‘Special’ within this window, click this next.

This takes you to what is essentially an advanced setting menu, a whole bunch of options and queries appear you can click on. We want ‘Blanks’. THis takes you to every instance of a blank cell.

Once you hit ‘Ok’ this should take you to the first instance of blank cell that occurs in the first row, from this you can figure out if the whole row is blank and remove it as necessary using one of the previously mentioned steps.

This is a helpful tool when you have a very long document you want to remove blank rows from.

Using Sort To Delete A Row

Using the sort function can show you all the rows that are blank so you can delete them easily with one key function.

Simply go to the ‘Data’ tab. In the ‘Sort & Filter’ section there is a sort button for alphabetic order. Either ascending (A to Z) or descending (Z to A) order, it doesn’t matter.

What should happen is that the blank rows have been left out of the search and are at the bottom if they are totally empty. Repeat a previous step to delete them.

Final Thoughts

As you can see there are many ways to delete a row, blank or not, from your Excel spreadsheet. There are a few other ways, but these are the quickest and most practical.

Deleting rows which are empty can really be important to the organization and clarity of a spreadsheet.