Need help to get rid of extra coumns in Microsoft Excel

[Chau]

I use Excel 2007 Home and Student. It has a lot of columns (max. number: XFD. you do the math). that means the horizontal scroll bar is very not sensitive, and not helpful for using only 3 charts. Can I make the sheet offer me less columns.

[Anirvinya]

You can't remove the columns (many people asked for more columns than the 256 limit in earlier versions !!), but what you can do is hide the columns that you don't need (or set them to zero width).

[Liliana]

A lot of people wanted more rows than 65536 and more columns than 255 so now we deal with the problems more rows and columns presents. Isn't progress good. But be careful of what you ask. you might get it. I will get off my soapbox now. have you tried saving the file as an xls instead of xlsx ie going back to the fewer rows and columns. I don't have 07 so I'm doing a lot of wild guessing now.

[Maadhav]

The problem with just hiding the columns, is that it doesn't prevent you scrolling through the hidden columns, and scrolling seemed to be the problem the OP was complaining about. An alternative would be to restrict the scroll area of the sheet. This would require some VBA code to set the scroll area each time the workbook was
opened.

Private Sub Workbook_Open()
Sheets("Sheet1").ScrollArea = "A1:Z100"
End Sub

Copy the Code above. Alt+F11 to invoke the VB Editor. Double Click ThisWorkbook in the Project Explorer pane. Paste code into white pane that appears. Alt+F11 to return to Excel. The code will be triggered automatically as the workbook is opened and will limit you to an area of the sheet from A1 to Z100. Amend range to suit.

[Avikshit Sinha]

I have discovered something weird. In a new clean sheet, the scrolling bar scrolls from A to M. But in the sheet I worked on and was talking about, the scrolling is from A to the last column XFD. When I deleted all of the graphs from my sheet (Only after there was no graph in it), the scrolling bar suddenly turned normal. Can someone solve the problem.

[Sharanya]

The scrolling usually involves only what Excel thinks it the used range. Excel in this case thinks your used range includes all columns. Select the first column in your sheet that you consider blank. Click the End button on the keyboard, then hold Shift and click the right arrow. This selects all columns from the one you selected to the right edge of the sheet. Right click on the column header and select Delete to delete these columns, and whatever about them Excel thinks you are using. After saving the workbook, Excel should now consider only the undeleted columns as the used range.

[Roockie]

There is something that Excel thinks you have as valid data in columns you believe blank. Scroll bar should normally be only those columns you are actively using. Are you formatting rows by selecting the entire row or are you selecting a finite range of cells to format. I have seen many spreadsheets with lines or shading etc. that goes all the way out to the limit. I believe this may be the problem.