How to Shift Data Up in Excel

Nothing brings a data analysis session to a screeching halt like a messy spreadsheet. You’ve just exported a beautiful report, but it’s littered with empty rows, forcing you to scroll endlessly and making your formulas a nightmare. Thankfully, getting rid of those gaps by shifting your data up is one of the most satisfying cleanup tasks in Excel. This guide will walk you through several methods, from a simple two-click fix to more powerful, automated solutions.

Why Do You Need to Shift Cells Up?

In Excel, "shifting cells up" is usually part of a "delete" operation. When you have unnecessary blank cells or rows that you want to remove, deleting them tells Excel to close the resulting gap by moving the cells below them upward. It’s the digital equivalent of taking a piece out of a Jenga tower and having the rest of the tower settle down neatly.

Common scenarios include:

• Removing Blank Rows: The most frequent reason. System exports often leave empty rows that break up your dataset.
• Deleting Extraneous Data: Sometimes you have outdated entries or rows of test data you need to purge without leaving a hole.
• Consolidating Lists: If you merge data from different places, you might end up with gaps that need to be closed to create a single, contiguous list.

Let’s get your data looking tight and clean.

Method 1: The Quick and Easy Right-Click Delete

This is the most direct method and perfect for cleaning up a few stray blanks. It works well when you can easily see and select the cells or rows you want to get rid of.

Deleting Entire Rows

If the entire row is blank or irrelevant, you don’t want to just shift up one column - you want to remove the whole thing. This keeps all your related data in other columns perfectly aligned.

1. Select the Row(s): Click on the row number on the far left side of the spreadsheet. To select multiple rows, hold down Ctrl (or Cmd on Mac) and click on each row number you want to delete. To select a contiguous block, click the first row number, hold Shift, and click the last one.
2. Right-Click and Delete: Right-click anywhere on the selected row numbers. A context menu will appear.
3. Choose "Delete": Select Delete from the menu. Excel immediately removes the entire rows and shifts everything below them up. Simple as that.

Use this when: You have entire rows of data that are completely empty or completely irrelevant.

**A Critical Tip: Rows vs. Cells**

Deleting an *entire row* ensures data integrity across your table. If you have a contact list and you delete only the cell in the "Name" column, the email address, phone number, and city for that contact will shift up and become misaligned with the next person's name. When in doubt, delete the entire row.

Shifting Specific Cells Up

Sometimes you only need to remove a cell from one column and have just that column shift up, without affecting the data to its left or right. This is much less common, but useful in specific situations, like cleaning up a single, standalone list.

1. Select the Cell(s): Click and drag to highlight the specific cells you want to remove.
2. Right-Click and Delete: Right-click on your selection.
3. Choose "Delete...": A small "Delete" dialog box will pop up.
4. Select "Shift cells up": Choose this option and click OK. Excel will delete only the cells you selected and pull the data from below up to fill the space.

Use this when: You are only working with a single column of data, or you intentionally want to make one column shorter without affecting adjacent columns.

Method 2: Use "Go To Special" to Zap All Blanks at Once

Manually selecting dozens or hundreds of blank rows is tedious and prone to error. Enter "Go To Special," a fantastic feature for finding and selecting specific types of cells - in this case, all the blanks in your dataset.

This trick is a huge time-saver for cleaning up large exported files.

1. Select Your Data Range: Click and drag to highlight the entire dataset you want to clean up. It’s often best to select the main column that determines if a row is empty (like a Name or ID column).
2. Open Go To Special:
3. Select Blanks: In the "Go To Special" dialog box, select the radio button next to Blanks and click OK. Excel will instantly highlight every blank cell within the range you originally selected.
4. Delete the Blank Rows: Now that all blank cells are selected, you can delete their parent rows in one go.

And just like that, every single row that contained a blank cell in your selected column is gone, and your data is neatly compacted.

Method 3: Set It and Forget It with Power Query

If you find yourself cleaning up the same report every week or month, the methods above are still manual. For repetitive tasks, Power Query is the ultimate solution. It lets you create a repeatable cleaning process that you can run with a single click.

Think of it as recording your cleaning steps so you never have to do them manually again.

1. Load Data into Power Query:
2. Remove Blank Rows: The Power Query Editor will open in a new window.
3. Close & Load:

The best part? Next time you have new, messy data, you can just paste it into your original source table, go to the Data tab, and click Refresh All. Your Power Query table will instantly update with all the blank rows automatically removed.

Method 4: The Non-Destructive Filter Formula

What if you want to create a clean, compact version of your list without deleting anything from the original data? The FILTER function, available in Microsoft 365 and newer versions of Excel, is perfect for this.

This formula spills a new, clean list into a different set of cells, leaving your original data untouched.

Let's say your messy list of names is in cells A2 through A50, with several blanks scattered throughout.

1. Click on any empty cell where you want your new, clean list to begin (e.g., C2).
2. Type in the following formula:
3. Press Enter.

How It Works:

• FILTER(A2:A50, ...): This tells Excel we want to filter the data located in the range A2:A50.
• ...A2:A50<>""): This is the condition. The <> symbols mean "not equal to," and "" means blank. So, the condition is "only include rows where the cell in the range A2:A50 is not blank."

Excel will instantly generate a new list in cell C2 and below, containing only the names from your original list, with all the blanks ignored.

Final Thoughts

Whether you need to zap a single empty row with a quick right-click, eliminate hundreds of blanks at once with "Go To Special," or build an automated clean-up process with Power Query, Excel gives you the flexibility to handle any messy dataset. Mastering these techniques will help you move from cleaning data to analyzing it much faster.

Spending half your Monday cleaning CSVs and getting data ready for reports is a universal pain point - it's one of the main reasons we built our platform. Splicing together downloads from a dozen different marketing and sales tools and manually removing empty rows in Excel just to get a clear picture of performance feels incredibly unproductive. It's why we focused on creating direct integrations with tools like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce at Graphed. It automates the data blending and cleaning, so you can build real-time, always-up-to-date dashboards with natural language instead of spending your valuable time wrestling with another spreadsheet.