Fast Way to Find and Delete Excel Rows

Find and delete Excel rows

It’s finally summer, and you need to stay cool, even when you’re using Excel. Here’s an energy-efficient and fast way to find and delete Excel rows. You can select several rows that contain similar data, and delete them all at the same time.

Find All the Data

In the worksheet shown below, there is a list of products sales, and a few of the records are for paper sales.

I’d like to delete those paper sales rows, without having to sort the worksheet, or spend a long time manually selecting the rows.

Find and delete Excel rows

Find the Paper Rows

To find all the Paper sales rows, I can use the Excel Find command. Here are the steps to do that:

    • On the Ribbon’s Home tab, click Find & Select, and then click Find.

FindAllDelete01

  • In the Find and Replace dialog box, type “paper” in the Find What box.
  • Click Find All, to see a list of all the cells that contain the text, “paper”
  • Select an item in the list, and then press Ctrl+A, to select the entire list. That will also select all the “paper” cells on the worksheet.

FindAllDelete02

Delete the Selected Rows

To delete the entire row for each “paper” cell that was found, follow these steps:

  • On the Ribbon’s Home tab, click Delete, and then click Delete Sheet Rows.

All the selected rows will be deleted, and the other product orders remain on the worksheet.

FindAllDelete03

Video: Find and Delete Excel Rows

To see the steps to find all the instances of a word, and delete the selected rows, watch this short Excel video tutorial.

More Find and Replace Examples

See more ways to use the Find and Replace commands in Excel, on my Contextures website.

Also, see how to select rows based on their conditional formatting colour, and delete the filtered rows. This example uses a list in a named Excel table.

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71 thoughts on “Fast Way to Find and Delete Excel Rows”

  1. Thank you very much for sharing this technique, i really appreciate and it helped me and saved my time. thanks once again

  2. Great tip…didn’t know it was possible to “bulk delete” like that! Instead of deleting, is it possible to copy the selected rows to the clipboard, or extract the selected record to another worksheet? If not, what about the ability to highlight the selected rows in some fashion? (thus making it easier to identify the rows in a large spreadsheet)

  3. When I attempt to select all then delete entire row, if de-selects my selecions in the find and replace tool. any Idea?

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