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.

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.

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.