Thanks again for your efforts, sorry I haven't been able to test your new codes while waiting for my spreadsheet to finish its 23 hr run. Both your codes work perfectly but are too slow for me at ~4 cells per second, I have 19 millions cells that will take nearly a month to complete. What I will do is demonstrate more patience myself and use the diag. select tool to delete my way through them manually, it should only take a few hours. If you are still interested my plan is to work my way down the left column of cells and selecting a diag. that gets shorter by 1 cell each step.& deleting... until I can pick big enough squares to delete large chunks at a time.