Formatting plays a crucial role in presenting data effectively in Excel. However, there are times when you need to remove formatting to start with a clean slate or make your data consistent. This tutorial will guide you through different techniques to efficiently clear formatting in Excel, whether it involves removing bold or italic formatting, resetting font styles, or clearing cell colors, borders, number formatting and conditional formatting.

Video: Clear formatting in Excel

Remove formatting with Clear Formats option

First, let’s learn the most straightforward approach to eliminate various formatting elements, including conditional formatting, from your data.

Step 1: Select the range from where to clear formatting

Step 2: Select the Clear Formats option

On the Home tab, in the Editing group, click Clear > Clear Formats.

Result

Excel removes all formatting from your selected cells right away.

Clear formatting (including formatting applied to individual characters within a cell) with Kutools

In Excel, individual characters within a cell can have different formatting, which cannot be cleared using the standard clear formatting option. This is where Kutools for Excel's Clear All Formatting feature shines. Not only can it clear formatting applied to individual characters or words within a cell, but it can also clear regular formatting, including cell colors, borders, conditional formatting, just like Excel's built-in clear formatting option.

After selecting the range from where to clear formatting, on Kutools tab, click Format > Clear All Formatting.

Wipe formatting with Format Painter

The Format Painter feature in Excel is a handy tool that allows you to quickly apply formatting from one cell to another. This means you can effortlessly copy the formatting of an unformatted cell and apply it to another cell, effectively wiping out any existing formatting, including conditional formatting.

1. Select an unformatted cell and click Format Painter.
2. Select the cells from which you want to remove the formatting.

3. 

Remove only conditional formatting

In the provided example, we have applied a conditional formatting rule (if cell value > 10 then format the cell with a light red fill and dark red text), cell borders and an orange font color. To clear only the conditional formatting while preserving other formatting elements, you can achieve this by following these steps:

Step 1: Select the range from where to clear conditional formatting

Step 2: Select the Clear Rules from Selected Cells option

On the Home tab, in the Styles group, click Conditional Formatting > Clear Rules > Clear Rules from Selected Cells.

Result

Only the conditional formatting is removed while other formatting elements are retained.

Above is all the relevant content related to clearing formatting in Excel. I hope you find the tutorial helpful. If you're looking to explore more Excel tips and tricks, please click here to access our extensive collection of over thousands of tutorials.

Related articles

• How to clear filters from all worksheets in active workbook in Excel?
• Supposing you have created multiple filters across different worksheets in an Excel workbook, and now you want to clear all these filters at once. Normally, you need to shift to the worksheet one by one to check the filter and then clear it manually. Is there any convenient method to clear filters from all worksheets in an active workbook? Please try the method in this article.
• How to clear filters when opening, saving or closing workbook in Excel?
• Suppose you have multiple worksheets containing filtered data in your workbook. To clear all the filters, you need to check the filtered list in different worksheets and then clear them manually one by one. That’s annoying! In this article, we will show you several methods of clearing filters when opening, saving or closing a workbook in Excel.