How To Clear Formatting In Word
Reviewed By: Kevin Pocock
Table of Contents
When working on a large document, formatting can often be harder than writing all the words.
Whether you are following a reference guide for an academic article or paper, or you are just trying to create a clear and informative document at work or for your community, this can be a useful tool to have in your locker.
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Being able to clear the formatting on your whole document, or just onto something you have copy and pasted, in one click, can save you loads of time to perfect the rest of a document, rather than arduously going through it manually.
Read on and follow these simple steps to become at formatting documents on Word with ease and finesse.
How To Clear Formatting
Maybe you have formatted a document as you have been going and have released your referencing style is wrong, or just that your formatting isn't working – you can easily start over with this simple move.
It's super simple to do but there are a few applications as well as ways of going about it.
Step
Clear Formatting On Text You Have Written
With this method you can clear formatting on specific paragraphs, or any piece of text you are highlighting.
Simply click on the ‘Home' tab, and within the ‘Styles' section near the end, you should see an option labeled ‘Styles Pane'.
If you can't see this, simply click the ‘Home' tab and the command ‘Ctrl + A' and it will show it.
Once you have opened the ‘Styles Pane' a window should pop up whereby you can click the option ‘Clear formatting' and it will return your text to the default settings of that font and formatting.
If you want to clear the formatting of a whole document, simply highlight all the text contained in the document, and repeat the same steps.
Ctrl + A is what will highlight your whole document for you. Even when doing this, anything in text boxes, headers and footers needs to be highlighted and cleared of formatting manually.
Step
Clear Formatting On A Quote
Sometimes when you copy and paste a quote or piece of text from somewhere else and paste it into a document it often carries the same formatting with it to your document.
In order to clear this formatting, you can follow the same steps previously mentioned.
Or, when you paste the text into the document a paste options drop down box appears usually in the far right corner of the text.
Within this drop down box there are two options to ‘Keep Source Formatting' or to ‘Paste Text Only', the latter option removes all formatting and only pastes the text.
Step
Word Won't Allow You To Remove Formatting
In this case, the most likely situation is that you have encountered a ‘Read Only' document where only the owner of the document has editing permissions.
In this situation you may be able to change the editing permissions yourself in the document settings, or you may be able to ask the original creator to allow you permission to the document.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, clearing formatting is really easy.
Whether you are removing the formatting from a piece of text you have copied and pasted from another website, or you are seeking to remove your own formatting mistakes (or simply start over) there is an easy method for all these needs.
In this situation using Word's ‘Styles' feature can help with formatting a document in the future and allows you to even apply one style over multiple documents which can be helpful when formatting future documents.
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