How to Delete Blank Rows in Excel
— The Right Way

Written by co-founder Kasper Langmann, Microsoft Office Specialist.

There’s something inherently irritating about spreadsheets with blank rows.

Excel sets out your data so nicely—and then its hard work is interrupted by blank rows.

It seems unjust.

Fortunately, you can remove blank rows with just a few clicks!

First, we’ll show you the manual way to do it, in case you only have a few rows to delete.

Then we’ll look at one of the common ways people recommend deleting blank rows—and show you why it’s a bad idea.

Finally, we’ll go over at an effective way of getting rid of blank rows.

*This tutorial is for Excel 2019 for Windows. Got a different version? No problem, you can still follow the exact same steps.

If you need to get rid of a small number of rows, you can go through the process manually.

Select a row by clicking on the row number on the left side of the screen.

Right-click anywhere in the selected row (or on the row number), and select Delete.

The row will disappear, and you can move onto deleting the next blank row!

This also works with rows that aren’t blank, so you can use it in a variety of situations.

The best way to learn how to delete blank rows in Excel is to do it yourself.

I’ve put together a free example workbook that you can use to follow along with the instructions. Download it before you go any further.

If you have more than a handful of blank rows, deleting them manually is going to take way too much time. You have better things to do than scroll through hundreds of rows right-clicking and deleting.

So let’s look at a much faster way to do it.

Open up the first sheet in the example workbook. You’ll see that there are several blank rows in the sheet.

Also, note that row 5 isn’t completely blank—it’s just missing one value. Keep an eye on that row as we go through this procedure.

First, select the entire area you’d like to delete blank rows from. We’ll select columns A, B, and C.

Next, in the Home tab, click on Find & Select, and click Go To Special…

Select the radio button next to Blanks:

When you hit OK, you’ll see that only blank cells are now selected:

In the Cells section of the Home tab, click Delete:

Clicking Delete Sheet Rows will delete entire rows, and this is often the advice you’ll find when you search “how to delete blank rows Excel” online.

As you can see, the original row 5 (with the name “Albina”) is gone. It had a single blank cell, but the entire row has been removed.

That’s why this method isn’t the best. Using the next method gets better results.

On the third sheet of our example workbook, you’ll see another dataset with some blank rows. We’re going to use filters to highlight blank rows.

Highlight columns A, B, and C, open the Data tab in the Ribbon, and click Filter.

To filter for blank rows, we’ll click the filter arrow in column A, uncheck (Select All), and select (Blanks):

As you can see, this leaves a few rows that have blanks in column A but data in other rows.

We’ll repeat the filtering for blanks in columns B and C to get rid of those rows:

Now, select the filtered rows, and click Delete > Delete Sheet Rows in the Home tab.

Clear the filters from the columns:

And your blank rows are gone!

There are several ways you can delete blank rows in Excel, ranging from the very simple to the more complex.

And while the simplest methods for getting rid of those rows will work, we recommend learning the more complex ones. You’re less likely to accidentally lose data.

It takes a bit longer to use filters to get rid of rows, but in the end, it’s a better way to do things.