Remove Manual Formatting from Word
If you’ve ever copied and pasted chunks of text into a Word document from a web page or another document, you may have noticed that both the new text and old text can sometimes start to behave oddly, changing size or font, for example, for no apparent reason. The unexpected changes are caused by hidden formatting commands interacting with the existing document’s formatting.
Here’s a couple of tips from Propellerhead that are worth remembering if you do a lot of copying and pasting, and the first one is to remove as much formatting as possible by using Word’s Paste Special feature. Simply highlight and copy (Ctrl + V) the text you want to paste in to your document, but instead of pressing Ctrl + V (Paste) go to Paste Special on the Edit menu, or click the Paste Special icon on the toolbar (it looks like an open book, next to the Format Painter ‘paintbrush’ icon, and on the drop-down menu that appears select Unformatted Text.
You can strip out any manual formatting in a piece of pasted text by highlighting the item then pressing Ctrl + Spacebar. This should then force the highlighted text to take on the formatting of the document or paragraph it has been inserted into. For more great Word tips, and hundreds of hints and tweaks for Windows PCs head over to the archive at PCTopTips
