Page 212 - Excel 2013 All-in-One For Dummies

194 Cell Editing 101
Get that out of here!
Sometimes you need to delete an entry that you made in a cell of the spread- sheet without replacing it with any other contents. Excel refers to this kind of deletion as clearing the cell. This is actually more correct than referring to it as “emptying” the cell because although the cell may appear empty when you delete its contents, it may still retain the formatting assigned to it, and therefore it will not truly be empty.
For this reason, clicking the Clear button (the one with the eraser icon) in the Editing group on the far right of the Home tab (or pressing Alt+HE) opens a drop-down menu with these options:
✦ Clear All: Use this to get rid of both the contents and the formatting assigned to the current cell selection.
✦ Clear Formats: Use this to get rid of just the formatting assigned to the current cell selection without getting rid of the contents.
✦ Clear Contents: Use this to get rid of just the contents in the current cell selection without getting rid of the formatting assigned to it. (This is the equivalent of pressing the Delete key.)
✦ Clear Comments: Use this to get rid of just the comments assigned to the cells in the selection without touching either the contents or the for- matting.
✦ Clear Hyperlinks: Use this to remove hyperlinks from the cells in the selection without also removing their formatting.
✦ Clear Hyperlinks: Use this to remove both the hyperlinks and their for- matting from the cells in the selection.
The Clear All option is great when you need to truly empty a cell of all for- matting and contents while at the same time retaining that empty cell in
the worksheet. However, what about when you need to get rid of the cell as well as all its contents? For example, suppose that you entered a column of numbers that you’ve totaled with a summing formula only to discover that midway in the list, you entered the same number twice, in one cell above the other. You don’t want to just delete the duplicate number in one of the two cells, thus leaving a single empty cell in the middle of your list of values. Having an empty cell in the middle of the list won’t skew the total, but it won’t look professional!
In this case, you want to delete both the duplicate entry and remove the newly emptied cell while at the same time pulling up the cells with the rest of the numbers in the list below along with the cell at the end that contains