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Eliminate Excess Word Formats

BY STANLEY ZAROWIN

Please note: This item is from our archives and was published in 2002. It is provided for historical reference. The content may be out of date and links may no longer function.

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Q. When colleagues send me Word documents that I have to incorporate into my own report, the material usually contains all sorts of formatting—multiple fonts, bold and italic type, underlined words and different indents. It’s very annoying to change the formats so the text of my final document looks consistent rather than like a jumble of styles. Is there a way to do that without having to change each one—one at a time?
A. I share your concern: The editors of the JofA get material for articles that contains a wide assortment of styles. If we had to remove each format one at a time, we would spend endless time mouse-clicking. The answer to your question is yes, thankfully, there are shortcuts that speed the job.

If you highlight all the text of the multiformatted document (Ctrl+A) and press Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Spacebar, you’ll remove all explicit character formatting—bold, italic, underline.

If you want to remove any explicit paragraph formatting and return a paragraph to its style-defined defaults—indents, tabs, line spacing—highlight the text and use Ctrl+Q. And if you want to quickly apply the Normal style to text, highlight the text and press Ctrl+Shift+N.