Can't delete "pages" from worksheet

[Curious Dude]

Hi everyone. I was trying to print a workbook which was about perhaps 20-30 sheets of roughly one page of printed info each. However, I saw the print job and it said it was printing over 7,000 pages!!!

It turns out there were about 4-5 worksheets which were blank (and also didn't have gridlines even though gridlines were checked on in options). When I switched the sheets to page break view, lo and behold each sheet contained a few thousands "pages". I simply can't seem to reduce it down to a relatively normal size.

I tried going right past the edges of page 1 and deleting all columns/rows to the right and bottom of it to no avail. I selected the whole worksheet and removed all borders and any cell content with no luck.

I saw other "solutions" on the internet about copy/pasting the other unaffected sheets to a new workbook and deleting, but this seems cumbersome and rather silly. Has anyone heard of this issue before, or at least be able to tell me why what I have tried hasn't changed anything?

[Pete_UK]

If you do CTRL-End on a worksheet, the cursor will move to what Excel thinks is the last used cell - sometimes this is way beyond the last cell that you have used. To correct it, you need to highlight all the rows beyond your last row (click on the row identifier for the next row, hold down the <Shift> key, then press <End> once followed by <down-arrow>, then release <Shift>, in order to quickly select all those rows), then click on delete. Do the same for the columns to the right of the last column that you have used. Repeat for other sheets. Then you must SAVE the file in order for Excel to take account of the changes to the used ranges on each sheet (you can check it by doing CTRL-End again).

An alternative, as it is just the printing that you are concerned with, is to highlight the cells you want to print, and set the Print Area, although this will not change the used range. Always do a Print Preview before committing to the printer.

Hope this helps.

Pete