Remove All Blank 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. Keep the inputs visible and clearly labelled and the whole thing stays auditable — anyone who opens the file later, including you, can see at a glance exactly what feeds the result and change one assumption without hunting through the formula. For “remove all blank cells in excel”, the reliable version is a short checking loop, not just the first command that appears to work. Run it on a deliberately small range first, watch how the affected blanks change, and only then apply the same setup to the full sheet. 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. That is what makes a layout choice that keeps the sheet readable and sortable useful in real work: repeatable, auditable, and not dependent on memory or luck.

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

If you are in Google Sheets rather than Excel, the good news is that the formula shown here is identical and the workflow barely changes — menus sit across the top instead of in a ribbon, and a few function names differ slightly, but anything you build here moves across with little or no rework. Nothing on this page is behind a login: the tool runs entirely in your browser, the formula is shown in full with one-click copy, and the steps work the same on Windows and Mac. That is the whole promise here — the exact answer, a way to prove it on your own numbers, and just enough context to make it stick. If you take one thing from this page on “remove all blank 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