Question

Is there better method of deleting rows in an excel spreadsheet than than what I currently use?

On a spreadsheet I run a macro that deletes a row if a figure in a particular cell is ‘0’.

Public Sub deleteRowsIfZero(colDelete As Integer)
Dim r As Long
Application.ScreenUpdating = False

For r = Cells(Rows.Count, colDelete).End(xlUp).Row To 1 Step -1
    If Cells(r, colDelete).Value = "0" Then Rows(r).Delete
Next r
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
End Sub

This works, but with a spreadsheet of 700+ rows it can be quite slow. Is there a more efficient method to do this?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Cheers

Noel

Answer 1

Turn off screen updating and calculation before you begin and restore those settings at the end.

Note that you are unnecessarily retesting a row every time you delete because the deletion slides the rows up. Therefore you could decrement r each time you do a deletion for a small optimization.

A further optimization would be to read in all the test values at one time. Each read/write from/to Excel/VBA has an overhead. See example below:

Dim r As Long, n As Long
Dim testcells As Variant

n = Cells(Rows.count, rowdelete).End(xlUp).Row
testcells = Range(Cells(n, rowdelete), Cells(1, rowdelete)).Value

For r = n To 1 Step -1
    If testcells(r, 1) = 0 Then
        Rows(r).Delete
    End If
Next r

You can also try deleting all at once to see which is faster.

Dim r As Long, n As Long
Dim testcells As Variant
Dim del As Range

n = Cells(Rows.Count, rowdelete).End(xlUp).Row
testcells = Range(Cells(n, rowdelete), Cells(1, rowdelete)).Value

For r = n To 1 Step -1
    If testcells(r, 1) = 0 Then
        If del Is Nothing Then Set del = Rows(r)
        Set del = Union(del, Rows(r))
    End If
Next r

If Not (del Is Nothing) Then
    del.Delete
End If