Clear Formats in Excel

When you work in Excel, you may find yourself using data in a variety of formats. This is especially true if you’ve had information shared with you by others who have applied their own formatting. It can be useful to remove formatting so that data values have a consistent look and feel. Fortunately, this is easy to do. Let’s learn how to use Clear Formats in Microsoft Excel.

How to Use Clear Formats in Excel

Imagine that you have several cells containing data inside your Excel spreadsheet. But they have a variety of formats. As you can see, one cell has bold, italics, and a yellow fill. Another has red text colors. The last cell is formatted in Percent Style. While individually these formats are great, they don’t work well together. They’re distracting and make your sheet look messy.

Fortunately, you can quickly clear formats to deliver a consistent look and feel to your sheets. To do so, begin by clicking and dragging your cursor to select the range of cells that you want to edit. Here, the range is D4:D6.

Then, go to the Home tab. You’ll find this on Excel’s ribbon, the series of menu tabs across the top of your screen. Over on the right side of the Home tab, you’ll see a dropdown menu that looks like an eraser. Click here.

This is the Clear dropdown, and you’ll see an array of options listed on it. These include Clear All, Clear Contents, Clear Formats, and more. In this case, you’ll want to use Clear Formats. Go ahead and click on it.

Excel will instantly remove all formatting from the selected cells. This is a quick and easy way to bring a cleaner, consistent look to the data in your spreadsheets. Try it out next time you need to remove formatting in a flash.