I had a situation today where I had a spreadsheet that contained hundreds of columns. I only needed five or so of these and I didn’t fancy going through them one-by-one to delete the unnecessary ones. I found the below snipped of VBA on stackoverflow. The code ran almost instantaneously and deleted all columns that I didn’t need. The country names are the columns that I needed to keep. I didn’t change/need the part of the code that deletes cells if they don’t contain the string ‘homer’.
Sub deleteIrrelevantColumns()
Dim currentColumn As Integer
Dim columnHeading As String
ActiveSheet.Columns("L").Delete
For currentColumn = ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Columns.Count To 1 Step -1
columnHeading = ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Cells(1, currentColumn).Value
'CHECK WHETHER TO KEEP THE COLUMN
Select Case columnHeading
Case "England", "New Zealand", "India", "South Africa", "Malaysia", "China", "Philippines", "Scotland"
'Do nothing
Case Else
'Delete if the cell doesn't contain "Homer"
If Instr(1, _
ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Cells(1, currentColumn).Value, _
"Homer",vbBinaryCompare) = 0 Then
ActiveSheet.Columns(currentColumn).Delete
End If
End Select
Next
End Sub
