Delete Sheet Rows in Excel

When you work in Microsoft Excel, you likely have data – text, numbers, or other values – placed across multiple rows in your spreadsheet. Sometimes, you’ll need to delete some of these rows. But you don’t want to simply delete the contents of the rows. That leaves blank spaces in your data. Fortunately, Excel has a helpful feature to totally delete rows. Let’s learn how to delete sheet rows in Microsoft Excel.

How to Delete Sheet Rows in Excel

Imagine an Excel dataset with data in rows 1 through 7. Imagine that you’ve decided to remove the data in rows 4 and 5. You have two options for it. In the first, you could simply delete the contents of the row.

But then, you’d have empty cells in rows 4 and 5. That’s a good option if you want to replace the old data with new data. But if you want to totally remove the rows, Excel has a better feature.

Delete Sheet Rows actually deletes the entire row. For example, if you use it to delete rows 4 and 5, the data in rows 6 and 7 will shift upward to fill the void.

To use DeleteSheetRows, begin by clicking on one or more rows to select them. Do that by clicking on the row number(s) found in the left side of your spreadsheet. To multi-select, hold Command and click on multiple rows (or Control on Windows).

Once you have a row or rows selected, go to the Home tab on Excel’s ribbon. On the right side, you’ll see the Delete dropdown menu. Click on it and look at your options. The one you want is Delete Sheet Rows. Click this.

Excel will delete the selected rows, and shift all data below them upward to fill in the empty space. As you can see, this is a quick and easy way to cleanly remove unwanted data in Excel.