It is common to keep editing or discard a few changes made to your sheets while working in Excel and the program is designed to make your tasks more convenient for you.
This article is a step-by-step guide to learn clear formatting tools in excel.
Steps to Clear Formatting in Excel
Let’s get started with this step-by-step guide to learn clear formatting tools in excel.
Misc – Clear all formatting in Excel with Keyboard Shortcut
Before we get into the different ways to clear formatting, use the following shortcut:
Ctrl + \
This will clear all the formatting and get back to the default formatting for the selected cells.
1. Clearing contents from a table
Here is a table with some formatting applied to it like borders, comments, texts etc.-
Now we wish to remove text contents solely from this table. Here’s how-
- Select the table for which you want to remove contents or texts.
- Press Delete on your keyboard to clear all texts, or
- Go to Home tab, under Editing section pull down on Clear or a pink eraser icon.
- Click Clear Contents.
All text data now gets removed from the table without any changes made to other formats like borders and comments. Here is how your table looks like without any textual data-
You can simply select a part of the table to clear contents solely from that part.
2. Clearing all formats and contents from a table
If you want to erase everything including borders, texts or comments, if any-
- Select the cells for which you want to clear all formatting.
- Go to Home tab, under Editing section pull down on Clear or a pink eraser icon.
- Click Clear All.
You can now find everything erased and all cells back to their normal condition.
3. Clearing formats only keeping texts
To remove all formatting such as text formats like bold, italics or underline, borders, text alignments, merging formats etc. without clearing the text or contents of the table, here’s how you can do it-
- Select the cells or table for which you want to clear formatting.
- Go to Home tab, under Editing section pull down on Clear or a pink eraser icon.
- Click Clear Formats.
4. Clearing comments only
If you have added comments to your table, you can clear them by-
- Select the cells or table for which you want to clear comments.
- Go to Home tab, under Editing section pull down on Clear or a pink eraser icon.
- Click Clear Comments.
5. Clearing hyperlinks from a table
To clear all hyperlinks-
- Select the cells or table for which you want to clear hyperlinks.
- Go to Home tab, under Editing section pull down on Clear or a pink eraser icon.
- Click Clear Hyperlinks.
All hyperlinks must be removed successfully without harming your data and formatting.
Conclusion
This was a detailed step-by-step guide to clear formatting in Microsoft Excel. You can follow these steps to clear any kind of changes made to a worksheet. Drop a comment and let us know if you have any doubts regarding this topic.