unwanted extra blank pages in Excel 2010

Anonymous
2013-01-13T17:34:03+00:00

Sometimes, when I'm working in an Excel 2010 document, I'll click File | Print just to see the preview of what the document will look like (in terms of its division into pages) when it's printed.

Usually everything is as expected, but occasionally Excel will arbitrarily decide that my document has many extra blank pages at the end of it.

No amount of removing page breaks or deleting rows at the end of the document (or relaunching Excel or rebooting the computer) will correct this.  If I save the document as a .pdf file, the problem persists in the .pdf file.

Can anyone tell me what's going on and how to fix this?

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2013-01-13T17:45:10+00:00

It would appear you've run into the infamousLast Cell property of Excel. To verify the cell that Excel believes is the last relevant cell, you can use Ctrl+End. This will take you to the cell that Excel believes to the the outer extent of information. The cell may not contain any information but the row and/or column it is on either has information or had information at some point.

To reset theLastCell of a worksheet, select a cell that is one down and one right to the one you want to be the absolute extents of your worksheet (e.g. all the way down and right). For example, if you want Z99 as the newLast Cell, select AA100. Next, walk through these steps to completely remove extraneous information,

  1. PressCTRL+Shift+<right arrow>. Release and pressCTRL+<spacebar>. Release and pressALT+E then D or right click the highlighted columns and selectDelete.
  2. PressHome, then pressCTRL+Shift+<down arrow>. Release and pressShift+<spacebar>. Release and pressALT+E thenD or right click the highlighted rows and selectDelete.
  3. PressCTRL+Home to return to A1. ImmediatelySave or (if you don't trust your keystrokes)Save As to confirm the new Last Cell position.
  4. PressCTRL+End and you should be in theLast_Cell (e.g. Z99).

It might seem like a lot, but it takes a lot more time to type it out here than it does to actually do it.

Due diligence: There is the potential here to delete a lot of possibly relevant data and/or formulas. Make sure you have a backup copy!

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  1. Anonymous
    2017-07-25T04:29:57+00:00

    If you want to skip all of that, what occurs to me is to just make the columns/rows so thin/shallow that they will fit on the same page as the text you want.  For example, in the worksheet I had, my last "real" data was on column H.  However, using the "ctrl + end" the last cell Excel recognized was AA on the same row.  I just made all of the columns between H and AA a width of ".001"  Problem Solved!  Seacrest-OUT!!!

    Thanks for that but it's not really the solution more a workaround.

    The good news is that I found the cause of my problem on this occasion!

    It was a rogue hyperlink attached to a small clear box which wasn't picked up by the Ctrl+End solution. It was unaffected by 'Clear contents; and changing or deleting rows/columns as it appeared to be formatted as 'on top of text' so it just stayed where it was, off the area I wanted to print, and was producing the second page. As you can see the solution from Conor would not have picked this up either.

    I can only think I developed my sheet from one originally created by someone else and they had put this 'invisible' link into the sheet then forgot about as it wasn't visible. If it hadn't been for the print to PDF issue I would never have known it was there.

    Happy days!!!!

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