albatross. 1  A metaphor for a dead weight or burden that one must carry, especially when the burden is not a literal one but a stigma of some kind that one cannot easily discard or throw off. The name comes from a story about a sailor who killed an albatross that was following his ship, an act thought to bring bad luck upon the ship.
Run the Remove Characters tool by clicking on its icon under the Ablebits Data tab in Excel. To remove characters select the range with the cells that contain values you want to delete. Expand the group Remove characters or substrings. You can select one of three radio buttons according to your task.
To reproduce: 1  Delete one column in a xls file with approximately 700,000 rows (again this is a large 300MB+ file), 2  Excel still displays the deleted column after deletion. 3  However, if you then save the file, close it, and then open the file back up again, you see that the deleted column is, in fact gone.