When you work in spreadsheets, you’ll often find yourself with unwanted data. You might input values by mistake, or simply no longer need to view certain data. Fortunately, Excel makes it easy to remove data with just a few clicks. Let’s learn how to clear all in Microsoft Excel.
How to Clear All in Microsoft Excel
If you have a cell selected in Excel, you can clear the contents by pressing Delete on your keyboard. But for larger volumes of data, this can take extra time. This is where Excel’s Clear All feature comes in handy.
It’s worth noting that Clear All has an important caveat: it clears all contents of selected cells only. It doesn’t clear every value from every cell.
To use Clear All, begin by selecting one or more cells in your workbook. Then, be sure you’re working on Excel’s Home tab. The Home tab is found on the ribbon, the list of menus and options across the top of the screen. These include Home, Insert, Draw, Page Layout, and more.
On the right side of the Home tab, you’ll see an eraser dropdown menu. Go ahead and click on this dropdown, and you’ll see a list of options. The one you want is Clear All. If you’re ready, click Clear All.
Excel will completely empty the selected cells. This will remove any data inside the cells, along with any formatting settings that you’ve applied.
If you want to Clear All from every cell in your worksheet simultaneously, click the Select All arrow. You’ll find this between the column A header and row 1 label in the upper left corner of your spreadsheet. Once you do, simply repeat the above steps of using the Clear All menu.
As you can see, the Clear All menu is a quick and easy way to remove all data and formatting from cells that you select in Microsoft Excel.