Adding colors and number formatting can improve the readability of your Excel reports, but sometimes you will want to remove all the formatting and start over. This is why it is essential to learn how to clear formatting in Excel as quickly as possible (we also want to be efficient, right?).
The most common way to remove all formatting in Excel is via the Clear Formatting option. To achieve this, simply follow these steps:
An alternative option is to remove formatting using Format Painter:
Clearing formatting using a keyboard shortcut is very fast. All you need to do is:
Quick Tip: You need to press the keys in successive order, not all at once.
Removing cell formatting from the entire worksheet is just as easy.
Quick Tip: If you have manually applied formatting only to some part of the cell contents, then you will have to change the color of the cell back to black manually. Using either Clear Formats or Format Painter will not remove such formatting. In the screenshot below, you can see that the word 'increased' has been formatted with green.
Conditional Formatting is a very powerful tool and can be used to achieve so many things. In fact, I've written a comprehensive article on How to find duplicates in Excel using Conditional Formatting.
However, if you apply too much Conditional Formatting, this will significantly slow down your Excel file. If this is the case, then it's really important to know how to clear Conditional Formatting in Excel using just a few easy steps:
Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut
+ + + + to achieve the same result.Quick Tip: You can also remove the Conditional Formatting from the entire worksheet by selecting Clear Rules from Entire Sheet.
If you still don't understand how to clear formatting in Excel after reading this article, please leave a comment, and I'll help you out. I reply to every single comment.
My name is Radu Meghes, and I'm the owner of excelexplained.com. Over the past 15+ years, I have been using Microsoft Excel in my day-to-day job. I’ve worked as an investment and business analyst, and Excel has always been my most powerful weapon. Its flexibility and complexity make it a highly demanded skill for finance employees. I launched excelexplained.com back in 2017, and it has become a trusted source for Excel tutorials for hundreds of thousands of people each year.
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