Anything you click or select after that gets pasted with the original formatting, and you can click the “Format Painter” button again to turn it off.įor more tips on using Format Painter, check out our full guide to copying formatting in Word. If you want to paste formatting to multiple locations, select the text and then double-click the “Format Painter” button. Select the text with the formatting you want to copy, hit Home > Format Painter and then select the text to which you want to paste the formatting. If you select just a few words of text, it copies any character formatting applied to that text. If you select an entire paragraph, it copies the paragraph formatting. Format Painter copies the formatting from selected text and then pastes it into other text. It would be a pain to have to change each block of text to match manually, so Word provides the Format Painter tool to help.

You’ve got your formatting set just so, and now you want various other parts of your document to look the same. RELATED: How to Wrap Text Around Pictures and Other Illustrations in Microsoft Word Copy Formatting and Apply it to Other Text If you’re not sure what text wrapping is, or why you might change it, we’ve got you covered. If you copied an image, you can change the format of the image when you paste (which we’ll talk more about in the next section).

If you copied text, for example, you could insert it as a separate Word document. The options available in the Paste Special window change depending on what you’ve copied. For example, you could paste as a Word document, picture, or even HTML. The “Paste Special” command lets you paste whatever you’ve copied as a special document type. There are also a couple of other options on the “Paste” drop-down menu. The text will take on the default formatting of the paragraph into which you insert the text.

Keep Text Only: This command removes all formatting from the original text.

Picture: This command inserts the text as a picture.

Merge Formatting: This command pastes just the text you’ve copied but changes the formatting to match the surrounding text into which you’re pasting.

Keep Source Formatting: This is the default option you get when pressing Ctrl+V, as described above.

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