Excel blank rows

[Feets]

Hi
In my work with a charity I’ve created an XLSX of appointments. I’m seeing a lot of deleted rows in amongst the data now its been running a while.
Whht do folks do with the blank rows? Leave them? What happens if they’re deleted in Excel ie does it break anything? Tips for keeping the data clean and orderly?
Also the blanks cause issues when they want to snap a copy for query and reporting (as AppSheet cant do ad-hoc reporting). You cant order/sort properly with blanks and have to perform more steps to remove them which means more user training.

[EIG]

I would try to find out why there are blank rows. Are you allowing users to save blank data? Are users deleting data by removing the text instead of deleting the row? It sounds like you have fields that are not required so people start a form, don’t fill it out, then save. You should work on not allowing that. Then, after that is fixed, go back and delete the blank rows from your data source.

[Feets]

Thanks EIG
Tracking thru the backups, the issue started the first day of use. In records I personally deleted, the row in Excel is blank. The process was to select the record/row in Appsheet and delete (ie it’s a table showing a series of appointments, select the appointment row, click delete). So these are “legitimate” deletes in Appsheet. Is this expected behaviour in AppSheet? Any suggestions on how to get to a root cause if not?

[EIG]

I don’t know how you are doing your ad-hoc reporting but I am doing ad-hoc reporting with Python and you can absolutely remove blank rows with Python. There are many ways but storing data in a Pandas data frame will provide alot of this functionality.

[Lynn · Accepted solution]

Hi @Feets
When you delete a row using the app, the data is just cleared, the row is not deleted. If you are not using row number as a key you can safely delete blank rows from your sheet.