In Excel: select the cells and choose Home ▸ Clear ▸ Clear Formats to remove fonts, fills, borders and number formats while keeping the values and formulas.
On this page7
Select the messy range.
Open Home ▸ Clear ▸ Clear Formats.
Check that values and formulas remain.
Reapply essential number formats such as dates, percentages or currency.
What this does
Clear Formats removes presentation from selected cells without deleting their contents. It resets colors, fonts, borders, alignment and number formats, but values and formulas remain. It is different from Clear All, which removes both content and formatting. Most people learn this as a sequence of clicks and forget it by next week; learning it as a pattern instead is what lets you apply it to the next, slightly different version of the problem without starting from scratch. That is the difference this page is trying to make. Treat “clear formatting in excel” as a small repeatable workflow rather than a one-off click you hope to remember next time. Use a small test block before the live file, so any surprise in the affected cells shows up while it is still harmless. When this is a ribbon command, the selection matters more than the button: confirm the range, apply the command, then spot-check the output before saving. That turns a workflow that saves repeating the same clicks every week into a method you can reuse, explain, and defend when the workbook leaves your screen.
A worked example
A pasted vendor list arrives with colored fills, mixed fonts and currency formats. Select the range, choose Home ▸ Clear ▸ Clear Formats, then reapply only the date and currency formats you actually need. Clearing formats is a fast cleanup step before analysis, imports and reports where pasted styling makes data hard to read or process. When the result is not what you expected, undo straight away rather than repairing it by hand — undo restores the sheet exactly, while manual fixes tend to leave small inconsistencies behind that surface later.
In Google Sheets
This is a command rather than a formula, so there is no syntax to carry over. Google Sheets arranges its commands in menus across the top instead of a ribbon, names some of them differently and does not have every Excel command — look for the equivalent in the Sheets menus or its help before assuming the steps match. Keep this page bookmarked for the next time the same question comes up. Better still, repeat the steps once in your own workbook — doing it yourself is what turns a copied answer into something you remember. Here is the takeaway for “clear formatting in excel”: follow the steps at the top, check the result on the sheet itself, and keep undo in mind while you experiment. Done once deliberately, it becomes something you do from memory in Excel rather than something you search for again.
Common mistakes
- Using Clear All and deleting data.
- Clearing formats from cells where number format carries meaning.
- Forgetting that conditional formatting rules can reapply colors.
- Selecting too large a range and removing report styling outside the target data.
Frequently asked questions
Does Clear Formats delete formulas?
No. It keeps values and formulas.
How is Clear Formats different from Clear All?
Clear All removes contents too; Clear Formats only removes cell formatting.
Why did colors come back?
A conditional formatting rule may still be active.
Other ways people ask this
This is also commonly searched as “clear formatting excel”, “how to clear the formatting in excel” and “how do you clear formatting in excel”. They describe the identical operation, so you are in the right place no matter how you phrased it.
Why do people search for this in so many different ways?
Because the same task has many names. “clear formatting excel”, “how to clear the formatting in excel”, “how do you clear formatting in excel” all point at the one operation explained on this page, which is why they all lead here.