How to find out empty, blank cells or rows in LibreOffice Calc

Learn how to find empty rows in LibreOffice Calc using three simple methods.

Find empty and blank rows in LibreOffice Calc

When you work with a large spreadsheet with a huge volume of data, it is very difficult to find out empty cells. Let’s find out how you can identify them.

We have a table below of data in LibreOffice Calc. And it contains some empty cells in various rows/columns.

Method 1

We will use the built-in ISBLANK function to check whether a cell is empty or not. This function takes a cell as an argument and returns TRUE if a cell is empty. Otherwise, returns FALSE.

=ISBLANK(A1): Returns TRUE if A1 is blank. 

In the example, enter the above formula and drag it until your last data item.

You can see the cells having no data in column F returned as TRUE.

This is the most basic way you can check. Let’s see how you can check with the IF statement.

Method 2

A similar result you can achieve by using the IF function. You can check for an empty string check, which is "". If the condition is true, you can return any text you want as per your needs.

=IF(F2="";"Blank";"Not Blank")

Method 3

While the above steps are good, it is always worth trying out a way to highlight the empty cells or rows or columns with some colours. That makes it very easy for data analysis. And you can do it using conditional formatting in LibreOffice Calc.

To do that, select from the menu: Format -> Conditional -> Condition.

In the conditional formatting window, select the entire range of data in the Cell range section that you want to highlight for empty cells. Then from the Condition 1 drop-down, select Formula is and enter =ISBLANK(A1) in the formula.

Note that even if you selected the entire range, you could specify only one cell in the condition, LibreOffice calc will take care of the rest of the cell.

Now select the style which highlights the empty cells, i.e. satisfy the above formula.

Once you do that, press OK. You can see the blank cells are highlighted with the Red style we selected.

References

ISBLANK function reference.