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
    2013-05-03T21:09:47+00:00

    The exact same thing happened to me when I tried to follow the instructions and my document ends wit the last row used as well, except the terminate excel part.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-01-14T02:11:52+00:00

    It could have also been the setup order for printing pages.  Consider the above assumed situation where a merged cell went beyond the bounds of a single page width.  Excel thinks whatever is out there in the "second half" of the merged cell needs to be printed also.  So it prints all pages.

    If your print sequence is set to the typical Down-then-Over, it would in effect print all odd numbered pages first then print all even numbered pages AFTER having printed the "down" group.  So all the blank pages end up at the end of the printout.  If you had Over-then-Down setup, you'd have probably gotten an blank page between each page with actual stuff to print on them.

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-01-13T19:14:44+00:00

    But the extra blank pages weren't interspersed, they were appended to the end of the document, and there were too many of them.  I agree, this is as clear as mud.  As I said, I believe this may be a glitch / bug in Excel 2010.

    But all's well that ends well!

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-01-13T18:58:54+00:00

    ... If you have any insight into what I just described, I'd love to hear it.  Thanks again.

    The only thing that comes to mind would be two cells merged across the last column and the unused one to the right. This would actually explain the extra pages as any Excel Print Area must be rectangular in shape and the merged cells would force printing an empty page with the extra column for every page in the original Print Area definition. Hope that is clear to you as it is only as clear as mud to me.

    I'm glad to hear this got cleared up. Thanks for the feedback and the kind words.

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