How to clear contents of cell in Excel?

Posted by Ken on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Ken
Published on 2010-05-12T17:20:29Z Indexed on 2010/05/12 17:24 UTC
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delete

I've been sent an Excel spreadsheet with a weird first row. Some of the cells say "Column1", "Column2", etc., but I can't delete their contents. If I select the cell and hit backspace, it goes blank, but when I press return, it goes right back to saying "Column1".

I found another answer here that suggested this could be caused by "Cell validation", but the validation window says "Any value", and also "show alert" (and I'm not seeing an alert), so I don't think that's it.

The first row is white text on a blue background, if that means anything. The spreadsheet was sent to me in XLSX format, but I tried resaving as XLS and opening that, and it seems to make no difference.

This is with the "ribbon" version of Excel (they got rid of the Help menu so I don't know how to see what version number it is!).

Thanks!

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