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  • 4/29/2025
In Excel, "clear formatting" or deleting formatting refers to the process of removing all of the formatting applied to a cell or range of cells. This includes formatting such as font type and size, text color, cell borders, and fill color.

When you clear formatting from a cell or range of cells, the cells will be returned to their default formatting, which is determined by the worksheet's theme and the settings in the "Normal" style. The cells will also lose any conditional formatting or data validation rules that were applied to them.

Clearing formatting can be useful in a number of situations, such as when you've applied formatting to a cell or range of cells by mistake, or when you want to change the formatting of a group of cells but don't want to manually remove the existing formatting.

To clear formatting, follow these steps.
1) Ctrl + A
2) Home --- Editing --- Clear
3) Clear Formatting


Essentially, there area 5 type of clearing cell properties and data. They are listed below.

Clear All
Deletes everything from the selected cell(s).
1) Ctrl + A
2) Home --- Editing --- Clear
3) Clear All

Clear Formatting
Delete all formatting from the selected cell(s).
1) Ctrl + A
2) Home --- Editing --- Clear
3) Clear Formatting

Clear Content
Deletes the content of the cell from the selected cell(s).
1) Ctrl + A
2) Home --- Editing --- Clear
3) Clear Content

Clear Comment
Deletes cell comments from the selected cell(s).
1) Ctrl + A
2) Home --- Editing --- Clear
3) Clear Comments

Clear Hyperlinks
Deletes hyperlinks from the selected cell(s).
1) Ctrl + A
2) Home --- Editing --- Clear
3) Clear Hyperlinks

Remove Hyperlinks
Deletes hyperlinks and formats the cell from the selected cell(s).
1) Ctrl + A
2) Home --- Editing --- Clear
3) Clear Hyperlinks


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Transcript
00:00If you want to clear formatting on your data set table here, this is what you do.
00:04Select any cell on your data set table here and press ctrl A to highlight the
00:10whole table itself. Next you need to be in home tabs under the editing ribbon
00:16that says clear here. You do click on it to pull down the menu here and then from
00:21here you're gonna click on clear format. What this does is that it clears all the
00:25format that includes italic, bolding, underline and even the font type but it
00:32does not clear comments. As you can see the comments are still there. To clear
00:36the comment again go to your clear and then there's this selection for clear
00:40comments and if you click on it all the comments are gone. There's few other
00:44clearing I want to show you. Let me undo everything again. Select any cell in your
00:48table. Press ctrl A to highlight the whole table. Let's go to clear again. The first
00:53one I want to show you is clear all. Clear all completely removes your data
00:57formatting and everything else. Let me undo this again. Press ctrl A select the
01:03table. Clear. Next one I'll show you is called clear content. Clear content only
01:08removes the data not the formatting itself. You might need it for some other things
01:13but not too sure how you use it but if you do please leave a comment in your
01:16description below. Let me undo this again. The next thing I want to show you is how you
01:21can clear the hyperlinks. As you can see this is a email address. If you put the
01:25URL it will be similar in nature. It will have underlined and blue and if you
01:30right-click a cell you can see that under the context menu the edit hyperlink is
01:35available. You see this hyperlink is available. To remove this this is how you
01:40do it. Again select any cell ctrl A to select the whole table. Go clear. There's this
01:47thing called clear hyperlink. If you click on it notice how looks like nothing
01:50really happened but something did happen. If you go back again click the cell
01:54right-click there's no more hyperlink selection on your context menu. That
01:58indicates that the hyperlink has been removed but the formatting is maintained.
02:02Let me undo this. Okay if a hyperlink is there now. So to remove both the
02:08hyperlinks and the formatting what you do is like this. Ctrl A to select the whole
02:13table. Go to clear and then you want to select remove hyperlink and notice when I
02:19do that you can see that the blue lines which is the formatting is gone along with
02:24the hyperlinks. The hyperlinks are gone as well.

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