How to Delete Blank Cells in Excel

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There’s nothing wrong with leaving blank cells in a spreadsheet, but when you’re striving for that professional look, it’s often best to take them out. Like most things in Excel, this is actually relatively easy once you’ve done it before.

With this tip comes one potential caveat: it could be detrimental to the data itself if you’re using formulas, or data ranges. Deleting cells leads to blank rows or columns, and if either of these are in the wrong place, it could impact some of Excel’s more powerful features. In most cases, though, it works just fine. And if you ever run into issues, you can always save a version from before your cell deletion to go back to should things go awry.

1. Open an Excel workbook. In this case, we’re just going to create a blank one, and use dummy data to demonstrate the method. 

2. Press the triangle icon between the A column and the 1 row to select the entirety of the data.

3. Press the F5 key to open a pop-up, and then select Special from the bottom left. 

4. Choose the Blanks option, and then press OK. This selects all the blank cells in the spreadsheet. Now we’re going to delete them.

5. On the right side of the ribbon, click the Delete option and then Delete Cells.

6. The next menu asks what you want to do with your now blank cells. In this case, we’re going to choose the Shift cells up option.

7. Click OK. 

Microsoft Excel Tips

Bryan Clark