The best thing I learnt in Excel this year

Often it is the simplest things in life that are most rewarding. Finding a new function in Excel that saves time doing a repetitive task is definitely something I count as rewarding, which is why I wanted to share this article about deleting multiple blank rows in a spreadsheet with you.

We have all been there. You receive some data in Excel that requires some cleaning up before you can do anything with it. There are thousands of rows and intermittent (and inexplicable) gaps between the data in the column you need. You can either go through and delete each blank row manually or you can use the fantastic Go to Special function.

You will find the Go to Special function on the Home ribbon under Find and Select (it’s on the far right).

The Go to Special function allows you to select certain cells based on various criteria. For the purpose of this exercise, we are looking to select the Blanks. To start this you need to select the row or column you are looking to alter by clicking on the column header, in this example we want to select column A which is a list of UK Prime Ministers.

After this go to Find & Select > Go to Special > Select ‘Blanks’ from the pop up box > Select ‘OK’.

This highlights all of the empty or blank rows in the data set you have selected. All you have to do then is right click on one of the highlighted cells, click delete and select ‘Shift cells up’.

All the blank rows in that column are then deleted and you have saved yourself some serious time in your data cleaning process.

Simple, effective and quick.

So why am I telling you about this? I work for a company called Filtered and we offer online training in essential business disciplines. Our most popular course is our online Excel training course which we developed specifically for the professionals that rely on and use this tool in a business context.

Instead of assuming you need to learn everything in a given subject, at Filtered we just teach you what you need to know. We do this by getting you to take a quick 10-minute diagnostic before you start your learning. From here we create an online course in each subject based on what you don’t know and what you actually want to learn.

All our courses are CPD UK approved and vary from Microsoft Office to Strategy, Leadership and Project Management.

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Filtered has teamed up with ILFM to bring members two exclusive discounts on this learning on either Excel or our all courses subscription:  

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