Copied text with odd fonts, random bold and strange indents makes a document look stitched together. Two shortcuts strip it back to your document's style so everything matches.
Step by step
- Select the messy text (Ctrl+A selects everything).
- Press Ctrl+Spacebar to remove character formatting such as font changes, bold and colour.
- Press Ctrl+Q to remove paragraph formatting such as manual indents and spacing.
Tips & troubleshooting
- Prevent the problem in the first place by pasting with Ctrl+Shift+V (text only).
- Neither shortcut removes styles like Heading 1; they reset text back to its style's formatting.
Three levels of reset
- Ctrl+Spacebar removes character formatting: font, size, colour, bold, italic and underline go back to whatever the paragraph's style specifies.
- Ctrl+Q removes paragraph formatting: alignment, indents, line spacing and space before and after return to the style's settings.
- The Clear All Formatting button on the Home tab, an A with an eraser, does both and also sets the paragraph back to the Normal style. Ctrl+Shift+N applies Normal on its own.
What they don't remove
- Highlighting. Use the Text Highlight Colour button and choose No Colour.
- The style itself. Ctrl+Spacebar on a Heading 1 leaves it as Heading 1; it only removes changes made on top of the style.
- Hyperlinks. Press Ctrl+Shift+F9 to turn a link back into plain text.
- Bullets and numbering applied as part of a list style. Click the Bullets or Numbering button to switch them off.
- Tracked changes and comments.
Find out what is causing the mess
When text refuses to match its neighbours, press Shift+F1 to open the Reveal Formatting pane and click on the text. It lists every font and paragraph setting in force. Tick Distinguish style source to see which settings come from the style and which were applied by hand. Ticking Compare to another selection and clicking a second piece of text shows exactly how the two differ.
Stop it happening
Most stray formatting arrives with pasted text. Paste with Ctrl+Shift+V, or set Word to keep text only by default under File, Options, Advanced, Cut, copy, and paste. In shared documents, change the style instead of formatting text directly, and everything stays consistent without any clearing up.