Stubborn “Read-only” notification in Excel won't go away

Question

I have a table in Excel that includes a set of cells copy-pasted from a TFS bulk edit worksheet. I'm usually careful and paste values only so that I don't get any of the data validation, etc. I'd like to clean up the cells with which I was not careful.

I can hit the "Ignore Error" option to remove the green corner (see B97:B103 in the image below). Doing so does not remove that yellow tooltip-like notification that reads "Read-only" (see image below). When I select any of the cells with the green corners, the "Read-only" bit shows up in the same location. As you can see, B92 still shows the tip, even though I tried to ignore the error.

I have also copied the column and pasted-values-only, but that did nothing to the errors and tip.

Answer 1

Finally figured this out.

• (1) Select the offending cells.
• (2) In the Data ribbon, select "Data Validation"

• (3) In the dialog, click on "Clear All" followed by "OK" to remove validation, input messages, and error alerts.