I know there are a few people skilled in excel out there, hopefully one of you will see this, I don’t think this will be too complicated to you. 
Thing is, I have created an excel sheet that is quite narrow. That is, I only use columns A-E. Now I want to delete, or perhaps just hide everything to the right of that.
I know this probably doesn’t have any practical use, I just think it would look better.
So. Anybody know how to?
Thanks. 
Not really.
However, what you could do under Tools > Options is uncheck ‘Gridlines’ in the View tab, and then just add gridlines to the area you are actually using. That way, the rest of the spreadsheet will look ‘blank’
From what I’m understanding, you just want to be able to see columns A-E. If so:
ETA: At least that’s how you do it in Excel 97 - 2003. I think it’s a little different in Excel 2007, but I don’t have it installed on my computer here at work.
Highlight the rows you want, click on the % box and choose ‘selection’.
It’ll enlarge your document though…
Or you could just delete the gridlines, like **sandra ** said.
How do you select all the columns? I try that, it just keeps adding them.
And I think the OP just wants the screen to be blank after column E. Could be wrong, though.
Select column F. Control+Shift+right arrow will select all of the remaining columns.
Yeah, removing was what I was aiming at, though technically, I guess hiding works too.
Lionne, the only % box I have, is the “percent style” option, and I assume this is not what you where reffering to. Any other way of getting to that option?
FYI I’m using excel 2003.
Another option is to select what you want to see, set that selection as the print area, then from the view menu select page break view. It gets rid of everything that isn’t in the print area. It also put a big ugly “Page 1 (2, 3, etc)” watermark on it, but I get used to that.
And you can fill in the cells any color you like so that it isn’t just white.
A slightly related question – how to eliminate excess rows in a spreadsheet.
I am using only about 200 rows in a spreadsheet. But the sheet has many more rows (up to 65,536, it appears). The problems with this are that when scrolling down, etc. it’s easy to overshoot, and also that the slider in the scroll bar on the right side is very small compared to the height of the bar (again making it hard to move to where you want).
So is there a way to tell Excel that I’m only interested in the first 200 or so rows in the sheet, and it doesn’t need to allocate and display 65,000 rows?
Interesting, the scroll bar should only go down as far as the last row with contect, so yolu may have some rogue character in aout of the way row. Try deleting the rows from 201 (or so) on down). It will still show the rows but should get rid of any rogue characters.
A quick keyboard shortcut to use is ctrl-<up/down arrow> which will take you from the row beofre it hits a empty row (in the same column), depending on the arrow direction (i.e. if row 2-20 have content and you are in row 7 and you hit ctrl-down arrow you will be taken to row 20 and ctrl-up arrow will take you to row 2)
It happens much more often without rogue characters. It’s supposed to work the way you mention … and 9 times out of 10, it does.
What’s more common (at least in Excel 2003) is that you have a sheet with, say, 30,000 rows. Then you delete some deadwood rows, or isolate some data, or whatever, and get it down to 12,000 rows. Excel invariably still “thinks” you have 30,000 rows, and the scroll bar works accordingly (easy overshoots, etc.).
One workaround is to copy your newly-reduced data into a new sheet. Then it will scroll properly.
This is generally solved by saving and closing the workbook then re-opening it.
… you would think, but no go. :shrug: It’s an ongoing annoyance I have with Excel. I have tried a zillion fixes. Nada.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I’m referring to the “zoom” box on the first toolbar. It usually has 100% in it, but you can click on it to change it to 25%, 200%, or the selection.
The rows aren’t really “allocated” until you use them, although Excel always shows all 64K (except hidden rows).
Even if you delete columns, it’s really just compressing them out and always keeping columns up to IV and rows to 64K.
The solution to this question as well as the OP is to hide rows/columns.
**Leaffan ** succintly deals with the problem above, and you can do the same thing for columns by using right arrow and hide columns.