Empty Rows Appear in an Excel 2003 Spreadsheet (816952)

SYMPTOMS

If you open a spreadsheet in Excel 2003, several rows appear to be empty and the file size of the spreadsheet is much larger than expected. If you click one of the empty rows, and then press the DELETE key, more empty rows are added to the spreadsheet and the file size of the spreadsheet increases.

CAUSE

This problem occurs when one or more of the following conditions are true:

You use Mail Merge with Excel 2003.
You try to clear data in a range of rows in Excel 2003.

WORKAROUND

To work around this problem, delete the empty rows, and then save the spreadsheet. To do so, follow these steps:

Open the Excel 2003 spreadsheet that contains the empty rows.
Click the number on the left side of the row, and then drag to select the section of empty rows.
Right-click the selected area, and then click Delete.

Note It may not look as if any rows have been deleted, but the number of rows and the size of the spreadsheet file have been reduced.
On the File menu, click Save.
Close the spreadsheet.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.