How to Delete All Empty Cells in Excel

What this does

Go To Special finds and selects every blank cell in one pass, so you can delete their whole rows in a single action instead of scrolling and deleting by hand. You highlight the data, open Go To Special (F5 then Special, or Home ▸ Find & Select ▸ Go To Special), choose Blanks, and Excel selects only the empties — then Delete Sheet Rows clears the entire rows they sit on. For larger or partially filled sheets, a Filter on "Blanks" is the safer alternative. The same idea underpins a lot of everyday Excel work, so the few minutes spent getting it right here pay back across every sheet you build afterwards. Treat it as a pattern, not a one-off, and it stops being something you look up and starts being something you reach for. The difference between a quick fix and a sheet you can trust is the extra minute you spend validating “delete all empty cells in excel”. Start on a copy or a tiny sample, keep the affected blanks visible, and compare the result with the tool above before you touch the real workbook. When this is a ribbon command, the selection matters more than the button: confirm the range, apply the command, then spot-check the output before saving. The point is a layout choice that keeps the sheet readable and sortable, but the practical win is that someone else can open the file and understand what happened without asking you.

A worked example

A 200-row list has empty rows scattered between entries. Select A1:D200, press F5, click Special, choose Blanks, and OK — every blank cell is now selected. On the Home tab choose Delete ▸ Delete Sheet Rows, and all the empty rows vanish at once, leaving the remaining ~170 rows packed together with no gaps. Blank rows break sorting, filtering and any range a chart or pivot reads — a single gap can stop a SUM or split a table in two. Clearing them in one pass with Go To Special is a core clean-up before any analysis. One habit worth forming early: name the cells that hold your inputs, so the formula reads in plain language instead of a string of cell addresses. A reviewer — or you in three months — can then follow the logic without decoding what B7 and D2 were supposed to mean, which is most of what makes a sheet maintainable.

In Google Sheets

Google Sheets handles this almost identically to Excel. The formula syntax above is the same, and the menu lives under a slightly different label rather than a ribbon tab. Use the platform toggle at the top of the page to switch every keyboard shortcut between Windows and Mac, and expect at most cosmetic differences in naming. The aim was to get you unstuck fast and leave you a little more capable than a copy-paste would. The answer is at the top, the tool proves it, and the detail above shows why it holds — so the next time a colleague asks, you can answer without reaching for search. If you take one thing from this page on “delete all empty cells in excel”, make it the habit rather than the keystrokes: set the problem up with labelled inputs, reference those cells, and let Excel do the recomputing. Bookmark the page for the syntax, but do the example once in a blank sheet and check it against the tool above — five minutes of hands-on practice fixes the method in memory far better than re-reading, and it surfaces the small snags while they are still harmless. After that the technique is genuinely yours: faster than searching for it again, and reliable enough to drop into work that other people depend on.

Common mistakes

• Selecting a column that has some genuinely empty cells on otherwise-full rows — Delete Sheet Rows would then drop real data.
• Using Go To Special on a huge selection where most cells are blank, which can grab far more than the empty rows you meant.
• Pressing Delete (clear contents) instead of Delete Sheet Rows, which empties cells but leaves the rows in place.
• Forgetting to select the entire row range first, so only part of each blank row is removed.

Frequently asked questions