Fellow Excel jockey...
 

  You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more

[Closed] Fellow Excel jockeys - deleting thousands of unused rows/columns

6 Posts
7 Users
0 Reactions
75 Views
 IHN
Posts: 19694
Full Member
Topic starter
 

I've just been sent a spreadsheet which is, essentially, empty (a few column headings on some empty tables on a few tabs, that's it), and it's coming in at nearly 4mb. Ah-ha, I thought, I bet it's the old "thousands of empty rows/columns" thing. So, doing a quick Ctrl-End, and I'm proved right, the last cell is in ColXFD(!)

The way I used to sort this was to select all the rogue columns/rows, right click, Delete, then immediately save, close and reopen. That doesn't seem to work any more, any ideas?


 
Posted : 08/03/2021 12:13 pm
Posts: 17273
Free Member
 

Copy and paste the info you want to a new blank sheet


 
Posted : 08/03/2021 12:16 pm
Posts: 13594
Free Member
 

A quick macro to delete empty rows / cols is what I'd use....


 
Posted : 08/03/2021 12:22 pm
Posts: 9201
Full Member
 

Perchy has said what I was going to say. I always go for easiest option so just C&P what you need and do away with all the guff.

Just keep the old version in case this approach throws some critical formula out of the window.


 
Posted : 08/03/2021 12:25 pm
Posts: 7270
Free Member
 

Clear contents should work


 
Posted : 08/03/2021 1:39 pm
Posts: 11961
Full Member
 

it’s coming in at nearly 4mb.

That's kids stuff. When I first learned some basic Excel stuff, I tried to get really clever with conditionals between different sheets (basically trying to use Excel to do something that needed a proper database). Then it crashed and crashed my PC. I rebooted and tried to reopen it but it all crashed again. Third time, I realized that I'd created a 4GB Excel workbook and 32 bit Windows could not handle it.


 
Posted : 08/03/2021 2:02 pm
Posts: 943
Free Member
 

what panther said.

I once tried to populate a 100 cols by 50,000 row matrix with formulas, and the file ballooned to 100GB. Needless to say it was tad slow after that.


 
Posted : 09/03/2021 9:02 am

6 DAYS LEFT
We are currently at 95% of our target!