Excel: how to delete text and fill color?

Question

In Excel you can press the Delete key to delete the contents of highlighted cells, but not the cells' fill color. Instead you need to click on the Fill tool on the ribbon and choose No Color.

Is there a shortcut key to this? I have done some Googling and it seems like the only way is to create a macro.

Solution

There are 3 functions in Excel to do this: Clear All, Clear Formats and Clear Contents

Clear All removes content and all formatting (i.e. Bold/Italic/Underline, Borders etc as well as the colours)

Clear Formats removes all formatting, leaving the cell content.

Clear Contents removes cell content, leaving the fromatting.

In Excel 2010 the buttons are located on the right hand side of the Home ribbon bar, under the Clear menu.

These can be accessed by the following key combination (do these one after another, not at the same time):

Clear All Alt -> h -> e -> a

Clear Formats Alt -> h -> e -> f

Clear Contents Alt -> h -> e -> c

Comments

[ganesh]

The workaround I use it the open the xls file in Open Office and then press "Delete" to delete the cell contents. The first time you do this you need to tick the option "Delete all" in this box: i.stack.imgur.com/ihmQM.png It then also deletes the cells background colour. Then save and reopen in excel.

[jingtao]

Clear All would be what I'm looking for here. Still need a macro to "reduce" the key combination to a shortcut like Ctrl+d. Thanks!

[Natalie]

also note that newer Excel should still support "old" key shortcuts, like ALT,E,A,F for "Clear All Formatting"