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• Why Deleting Filtered Rows Crashes Excel

• Sort the Data First to Prevent Excel From Crashing

Removing rows from a large filtered range in Microsoft Excel can be time-consuming, cause the program to temporarily become unresponsive, or even lead to a crash. However, by taking one simple step, you can help ensure Excel continues to run smoothly.

Why Deleting Filtered Rows Crashes Excel

Imagine you're working with a dataset of 50,000 products and want to clean it up by removing rows containing discontinued items.

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Posts 2 Start by clicking the filter button in the Status column, uncheck "Active," and click "OK." This will display only the discontinued items in the table.

Next, select any cell within the data range and press Ctrl A to highlight all visible cells. Right-click on the selected area and choose Delete > Entire Sheet Row. This action will delete only the currently displayed rows, allowing you to later remove the filter to see the active items again.

At this point, Excel might warn you that the operation could take a long time to complete.

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Don't waste time waiting for Excel to respond.

PostsIndeed, when I clicked "OK," Excel froze for about 42 seconds—including entering the "not responding" state—before finally returning to normal and displaying the expected result.

Furthermore, when I pressed Ctrl Z to undo the deletion, Excel crashed completely, forcing me to close and reopen the application.

This issue occurs because most of the rows marked for deletion are not adjacent to each other. Looking at the row numbers on the left side of the sheet, you'll notice that they form a non-continuous set since the hidden rows still exist but aren't visible due to filtering.

Consequently, when Excel attempts to delete these visible rows, it must process each group of connected cells—known as an area—individually. In this example, Excel deletes row 4, then rows 12 through 14, followed by row 16, and so on. With a total of 11,873 such areas in this dataset, Excel ends up performing the deletion operation over 11,000 separate times!

Sort the Data First to Prevent Excel From Crashing

To avoid Excel crashing while deleting rows from a large filtered dataset, simply sort the relevant column before proceeding.

However, before doing this, consider how you'd like your data organized after deletion. In this case, the products are listed in the order they were added to the inventory, which is important to preserve in the long run.

To maintain this original order, add a new column titled "Index" and enter 1, 2, and 3 into the top three cells of this column.

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PostsNext, click the filter button in the Status column and choose either "Sort A To Z" or "Sort Z To A." Clicking "OK" will group items with the same status together.

Now, click the filter button once more, uncheck "Active," and click "OK" to show only the discontinued items.

Observe how all the discontinued products now appear in consecutive rows. This means that when you proceed to delete them in the next step, Excel only needs to handle a single block of data instead of processing over 11,000 individual areas as it would have without sorting first.

As a result, selecting all visible cells (Ctrl A), right-clicking, and choosing Delete > Entire Sheet Row will complete the task in less than a second.

Once the deletion is done, click the filter button in the Status column again, clear the filters, and click "OK" to view the active products once more.

Finally, restore the original order of the data by sorting based on the Index column, and remove the Index column if it's no longer needed.

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Understanding what causes Excel to slow down can prevent frustration. For instance, using too many volatile functions or applying excessive formatting unnecessarily makes Excel—and your computer—work harder than required, so try to minimize these practices where possible!

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