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How to clear formatting in Excel

by Svetlana Cheusheva, updated on March 21, 2023

This short tutorial shows a couple of quick ways to remove formatting in Excel worksheets.

When working with large Excel worksheets, it's a common practice to apply di�erent formatting
options to make data relevant to a particular situation stand out. In other situations, however, you
may want to highlight other data, and for this, you will need to remove the current format �rst.

Manually changing cell color, font, borders, alignment and other formats would be tiresome and time-
consuming. Luckily, Microsoft Excel provides a couple of quick and simple ways to clear formatting in
a worksheet, and I will show you all these techniques in a moment.

How to remove all formatting in Excel

A quick way to clear formatting with Format Painter

How to clear all formatting in Excel

The most obvious way to make a piece of information more noticeable is to change the way it looks.
Excessive or improper formatting, however, may have an opposite e�ect, which makes your Excel
worksheet di�cult to read. The easiest way to �x this is to remove all current formatting and start
embellishing the worksheet from scratch.

To remove all formatting in Excel, just do the following:

1. Select the cell or range of cells from which you want to clear formatting.

2. On the Home tab, in the Editing group, click the arrow next to the Clear button.

3. Select the Clear Formats option.

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This will erase all cell formatting (including conditional formatting, number formats, fonts, colors,
borders, etc.) but keep the cell contents.

Clear Format tips

With this Excel Clear Formatting feature, you can easily remove formats not only from a single cell, but
also from an entire row, column or worksheet.

To clear out formatting from all cells on a worksheet, select the entire sheet by pressing Ctrl+A or
by clicking the Select All button at the top-left corner of the worksheet, and then click Clear
Formats.

To remove formatting from a whole column or row, click the column or row heading to select it.

To clear formats in non-adjacent cells or ranges, select the �rst cell or range, press and hold the
CTRL key while selecting other cells or ranges.

How to make the Clear Formats option accessible in a click

If you want to have a one-click tool to remove formatting in Excel, you can add the Clear Formats
option to the Quick Access toolbar or Excel ribbon. This might be especially useful if you receive many
Excel �les from your colleagues or clients and their formatting prevents you from making the data
look the way you want.

Add the Clear Formats option to Quick Access toolbar

If Clear Formats is one of the most used features in your Excel, you can have it added to the Quick
Access Toolbar in the top-left corner of your Excel window:

To do this, perform the following steps:

1. In your Excel worksheet, click File > Options, and then select Quick Access Toolbar on the left-side
pane.

2. Under Choose commands from, select All Commands.

3. In the list of commands, scroll down to Clear Formats, select it and click the Add button to move it

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to the right-hand section.

4. Click OK.

Add the Clear Formats button to the ribbon

If you'd rather not clutter your Quick Access toolbar with too many buttons, you can create a custom
group on the Excel ribbon and place the Clear Formats button there.

To add the Clear Formats button to the Excel ribbon, follow these steps:

1. Right-click anywhere on the ribbon, and select Customize the Ribbon…

2. Because new commands can only be added to custom groups, click the New Group button:

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3. With the New Group selected, click the Rename button, type the name you want, and click OK.

4. Under Choose commands from, select All Commands.

5. In the list of commands, scroll down to Clear Formats, and select it.

6. Select the newly created group and click Add.

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7. Finally, click OK to close the Excel Options dialog and apply the changes you've just made.

And now, with the new button in place, you can remove formatting in Excel in a single click!

How to remove formatting in Excel using Format Painter

I guess everyone knows how to use Format Painter to copy formatting in Excel. But have you ever
thought that it can also be used to clear format? All it takes is these 3 quick steps:

1. Select any unformatted cell close to the cell from which you want to remove formatting.

2. Click on the Format Painter button on the Home tab, in the Clipboard group.

3. Select the cell(s) from which you want the formatting cleared.

That's all there is to it!

Note. Neither Clear Formats nor Format Painter can clear formatting applied to only some part of
the cell contents. For example, if you highlighted just one word in a cell with some color, like shown

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in the screenshot below, such formatting won't be removed:

That's how you can quickly remove formatting in Excel. I thank you for reading and hope to see you on
our blog next week!

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