Clean Up Your Worksheet in Microsoft Excel


Excel

So, you hit Ctrl+End and it takes you way down to some cell you think you never touched before. Certainly miles beyond your data...

Once you have entered anything into a cell or once you have formatted a cell...that's it. Excel calls it a "dirty" cell and it becomes part of the "used range".

You need to clear all the empty cells.

  1. Go to the first completely blank column at the right of your data. Select the column by clicking on its letter. Hold Shift+Ctrl and then hit the right arrow key until you have selected all the way out to Column IV. Hit Edit Clear All or Edit Delete.
  2. Go to the first completely blank row at the bottom of your data. Select the row by clicking on its number. Hold Shift+Ctrl and then hit the down arrow key until you have selected all the way down to Row 65536. Hit Edit Clear All or Edit Delete.
  3. Save the file. If you don't save the file, I can't guarantee it works!