This Tip of the Day is about something very simple that not many people know of – how to paste text in Word without the formatting. When you copy text to Word from an external source, by default the text is pasted with all the formatting that goes with it. It would have been OK, if the formatting styles of the source and destination documents were the same but this happens extremely rarely. Therefore, when you paste text with “foreign” formatting, you spoil the formatting of your document. If you do not care about fonts, sizes, and other formatting attributes, you will hardly notice the difference, besides that your document has become a bit of a mess and you don’t know why.
A way to avoid pasting “foreign” formatting is by using Edit -> Paste Special -> Unformatted Text. Note: The words “Unformated Text” might differ depending on what you paste from but you get the idea that you need to choose a similar command to have only bare text pasted. After you have pasted the bare text, the next step is to dress it in the formatting of the document. For this, you need the Format Painter icon. This icon is generally not viewable right away on the toolbar and first you need to add it to a toolbar. Right-click on a toolbar and choose Customize. Get the Format Painter icon and drag it to the toolbar. Then click on some text the formatting attributes of which you want to copy. The pointer turns into brush. Next, select the text you want the attibutes copied to and relese the mouse button. And this is all.
But if you want to make sure that everything is OK, select Format -> Styles and Formatting and see if the two pieces of text have the same formatting attributes listed. Hopefully, everything is fine but if necessary, repeat the procedure.
Dealing with formatting in Word can be very boring and nerve-wreching but if you want your documents to have the proper look, there is no other way but to pay attention to the formatting.
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