How do I clear all output results in a notebook?

[KendraVant]

I'm building notebooks for tutorial sessions and I want to clear all the output results from the notebook before distributing it to the participants.

This functionality exists in Juypter but I can't find it in Databricks. Any pointers?

[Arun_KumarPT]

Hi Kendrav,

I used to export the notebook after my work. The exported notebooks will not have any output messages. You can distribute the exported notebooks.

[KendraVant]

Hi Arunkumar. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to work for me. Did you do anything special before you exported? I still find all the results display when I import a notebook from someone else.

[Arun_KumarPT]

's3Connection' is a scala notebook.

For export,

For import,

[KendraVant]

Thanks Arumkumar. Hopefully simpler functionality is on it's way.

[schnee1]

I recently watched a webinar in which @rxin clear the results from the Javascript Console (in Chrome)

View -> Developer -> JavaScript Console

and then type "notebook.clearResults()"

The webinar was about Spark 2.0, which was great, but that little bit of JavaScript was a gem. Databricks should expose that in the UI somewhere.

[Shawn_Eary]

schnee1's solution seems like it might not work since the function appears to be called client side, but I just tried this in MS Edge on Windows 11 and it seemed to fix the problem where I couldn't clone a Notebook that had too much cell output. Very strange. Also, I agree with schnee1 that the "notebook.clearResults()" function call should be made available as a client-side button.

[holly · Accepted solution]

Yes! Run >  Clear >  Clear all cell outputs

Fun fact, this feature was made ~10 years ago when we realised all our customer demos looked very messy and had lots of spoilers in them!