Remove formatting, hyperlinks, and comments in Excel

Clearing out cells of font mismatches, fill colors, hyperlinks, comments, and conditional formatting doesn't have to be tedious. There's a much easier way.

First select the cells you want to clear. In Excel 2007, you need to go to the Edit menu and select the Clear command to access Clear Formats. In Excel 2010, Clear has moved to the default Home tab so it's even easier to find Clear Formats:

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Clear Contents leaves the formatting but empties the cells of data. You can save time by simply using the Delete key for this. Clear Comments will quickly remove all of your comments from selected cells.

Office 2010 has some additional functionality for removing hyperlinks. Clear Formats will clear the hyperlinks along with all formatting - but if you want to keep your formatting, choose Remove Hyperlinks instead. Or, if you remove hyperlinks from worksheets regularly, you could use this handy hyperlink removal macro that can be assigned to a keyboard shortcut.

Suzanne