In this tutorial, I am going to show you 3 easy methods to remove drawing tools in Excel. A lot of times when you copy any data from other sources, there might be a lot of unnecessary shapes and objects. You can use the methods that I will explain in the following section to clear these objects.
Drawing Tools in Excel
Drawing in Excel means making any shape. All of these shapes, text boxes, and other objects are called Drawing Tools. We may keep or remove Excel drawing tools as per our needs. In Excel, there are both predefined drawing tools and freeform drawing options. Both of these tools are very useful in making the data look more visual. Note that Excel charts also fall in this category of drawing tools that you can use when needed.
How to Remove Drawing Tools in Excel (3 Easy Methods)
The dataset that we will use to remove the drawing tools contains various shapes as Excel objects. We have taken multiple shapes to show the power of the methods to work with a large number of objects in no time.
1. Using Go To Special Feature
The Go To Special feature in Excel allows you to quickly find and select any item that meets certain criteria. We will use this feature to remove drawing tools from our Excel worksheet.
Steps:
- First, go to the Home tab.
- Then, go to the Editing section and click on the drop-down Find & Select.
- Here, select Go To Special.
- Now, in the Go To Special window, select Objects and press OK.
- As a result, this will find and select all the objects that are present in the current worksheet.
- Finally, press Delete and Excel will remove all the shapes.
Read More: How to Use Drawing Tools in Excel
2. Utilizing Selection Pane in Excel to Remove Drawing Tools
We can select and remove any drawing tools with the help of the Selection Pane in Excel. This option will give us a list of all the available objects on our worksheet and then we can remove them very easily. Let us see how to use it.
Steps:
- To begin with, navigate to the Page Layout tab.
- Now, under the Arrange section, click on Selection Pane.
- Here, in the Selection window, you will see the list of all available objects.
- Finally, select any of them or all of them and press the Delete key to remove them from the worksheet.
Read More: How to Perform Drawing of Objects with VBA in Excel
3. Remove Drawing Tools Using VBA Code in Excel
If you have a large number of drawing tools in Excel that you want to remove from a large number of worksheets, then using VBA would be the best option. Follow the steps below.
Steps:
- First of all, navigate to the Developer tab and click on Visual Basic.
- Next, in the Visual Basic window, go to Insert and click on Module.
- Now, in the new Module1 window, type in the following code:
Sub Delete_Drawing_Tools()
Dim obj As Shape
Dim wbook As Workbook
Dim wsheet As Worksheet
'Go through all worksheets
For Each wsheet In ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets
'Loop through the objects of the current worksheet
For Each obj In wsheet.Shapes
'Remove object
obj.Delete
Next obj
Next wsheet
End Sub
- After that, close the Visual Basic window and go to the Developer tab.
- Here, click on Macros.
- Consequently, this will open a new window of the Macro list that is available in the workbook.
- Here, select the macro we just created and click on Run.
- Immediately, this will delete all the objects from all the worksheets.
Read More: How to Create Drawing Register in Excel
How to Hide Drawing Tools
Sometimes you may not want to remove the drawing tools or objects in Excel altogether. Rather you want to hide them. This method can help you in doing that.
Steps:
- To begin with, go to the Page Layout tab.
- Then, navigate to the Arrange section and select the Selection pane.
- Now, in the Selection window, you should see the list of all the objects.
- Finally, click Hide All to hide all the objects or hide an individual object by clicking on the Eye icon next to it.
Things to Remember
- The methods above can be used equally to remove any text boxes.
- Make sure to type the VBA syntaxes properly, otherwise, it won’t work.
- Keep in mind that when you run the VBA macro, it will remove all the objects from each worksheet and not only the current sheet.
Download Practice Workbook
You can download the practice workbook from here.
Conclusion
I hope that you understood the methods I showed in this tutorial on how to remove drawing tools in Excel. I would recommend you go through the suggested steps of each method multiple times and understand them very well. Also, download the practice workbook and try adding more objects to test yourself.
