Clear Contents in Excel

Working in spreadsheets, you may find yourself with unwanted data and values in one or more cells. It’s useful to delete these values at a single click. But you might also want to preserve any formatting that you’ve applied. Fortunately, Excel makes it easy to do exactly that. Let’s learn how to clear contents in Microsoft Excel.

How to Clear Contents in Excel

Imagine that you have a list of data in Excel, to which you’ve applied an array of colorful highlights. You want to delete the data and add new values to the cells in question. But you don’t want to redo all of the careful formatting work.

This is where Microsoft Excel’s Clear Contents feature shines. With a single click, you can delete the contents of these cells without deleting the formatting inside.

To get started, go ahead and select the range that you want to delete. In this example. It’s cells D1:D7. To do this, simply click and drag your cursor over the range to select it.

Then, be sure you’re working on Excel’s Home tab. The Home tab is found in the upper left corner of the Excel screen. Over on the right side, you’ll see a dropdown icon with an image of an eraser on it. Click on the adjacent arrow, and you’ll see the Clear dropdown menu appear.

On it, you’ll see several options. The one you want is Clear Contents. With a cell or cells selected, click Clear Contents. 

Any text and number values inside the cells will disappear. But all of your formatting – in this case, the colorful highlights – will remain. Now, you can replace the deleted data with new values of your own.