You might see patterns right away, like every row with 2020 Banquet has a blank date. Now all of your rows are grouped by how many columns are filled in. Highlight all columns and add then sort by column row status Largest to Smallest or Z to A. For example, =COUNTA(A2:J2)ĭrag or copy to fill your formula down the column In the cell below use the formula =COUNTA and include the first row of data in your range. We use COUNTA rather than COUNTBLANK because its easier to think How many cells in this row have data? rather than How many blanks shouldnt there be? If your data spans 10 columns, wouldnt it be nice to clearly separate the rows that had data in 9 cells from the rows that only had data in 2? Its the exact opposite of a COUNTBLANK function. Then, sort or filter.Ī COUNTA formula counts the number of cells in a range that are not empty. There is a way to find and delete the blank rows in a data set with a lot of missing values… Method #3. You dont want to delete an entire row of data youve invested in collecting just because there are a few, or even many, fields missing. If you find that in your search for blank rows, you are uncovering rows with blank cells, youll need to investigate. dates in the rows above and below your blank date cell) might have given you an idea of what the blanks should have been replaced with, but now that youve rearranged your rows, youre not sure where they belong. If you sorted by newest to oldest date, but had some missing dates, youve just thrown all of the rows containing blank date cells to the end of your dataset. In methods 1 and 2, you might encounter rows that contain blanks, but are not entirely empty. (NOTE: you must sort by row status to group the blanks together prior to deleting them) What if its not that simple? (hint: its probably not) Now you can sort by row status to group the blanks for deletion or filtering Select all cells (Command + A on Mac Ctrl + A on Windows)Ĭlick one of the filter column tabs where every row has a value and select (blanks)Ĭopy this down to your first un-highlighted(un-filtered) row Use Excels filter function to filter a column for blanks to group them all together for an easy way to select and mark, hide, sort, or delete blank rows all at once. newest to oldest, A to Z, smallest to largest). (use a column that has a value in every row) In the column field, select the column you want to sort by Under the data tab, select the sort function If you have a lot of blank cells, columns, or rows, Select All may miss some data.
Just be sure all of your data is highlighted prior to sorting. date from newest to oldest), you can sort the entire sheet and watch the completely blank rows fall off. If it makes sense to organize your data by a certain column, (i.e. Method #1: Sort them out.Įxcels column sort function wont order blank cells. In this series, we will describe different methods for cleaning data that have common problems such as blank rows, duplicates, multiple values in one column, data split into too many columns, leading zeroes, numbers that dont act like numbers, basic data recoding, and comparing two versions of a spreadsheet. Google Sheets and Excel are widely available and powerful tools for basic data cleaning of small to medium data sets. At Inciter, we use many tools to clean data.
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