Learn How to Clear Formatting from a Range of Cells in Excel

How to Clear Cell Formatting In Excel

Numbers Stored as Text

In my previous tutorial, I demonstrated how to clear all text formatting from all slides in a PowerPoint Presentation. Several viewers contacted me about publishing a tutorial that demonstrates how to clear formatting from ranges of cells in Excel.

Use the Clear Formatting Command

From my experience, I had found that a great many Excel users expect that formatting as well as contents are cleared when you press the Delete Key. This is not the case. The Delete Key only clears the contents of the cells in the selected range.

Use the Clear Formatting Command in the Editing Group on the Home Tab of the Ribbon. If you are using Excel 2003 or earlier, you will find this on the Edit Menu.

Numbers Stored as Text

As a Best Practice, I strongly recommend that you verify that the numeric values that you will be using in formulas are truly numbers and not numbers stored as text. This, unfortunately is a common case whenever you are working with data that has been imported from a main frame computer or other external sources. In this lesson, I demonstrate how to use Paste Special Operators to quickly convert numbers stored as text to true numeric values.

9 Essential Skills for Excel 2010 Video Tutorial

Nine Essential Skills for Excel

I cover, in-depth, Entering and formatting data as well as using Paste Special Options on my new video resource, “Nine Essential Skills for Excel.”