Paragraph formatting instructions are not stored in a code at the beginning of a paragraph, but are stored in the paragraph mark at the end of each paragraph. A paragraph is defined by a paragraph mark at the end of the text. What It Is: the smallest unit paragraph formatting can be applied to is one paragraph. Although you shouldn’t have text that is randomly formatted like the example below, it is possible with character formatting in Microsoft Word. With this, a line of text could have a different style of font formatting for every single letter and number including spaces. What It Is: The smallest unit character formatting can be applied to is one character (letter, number, or other). In Microsoft Word documents, character or font formatting includes:įont typeface (such as Calibri, Arial, Times New Roman)

Microsoft Word Formatting for Characters or Font To help understand Microsoft Word formatting, let’s look at the four types of formatting: To save time formatting a Word document, watch my training video below or continue with this article. Power Users can learn these “Big 3” format removal keystroke shortcutsĬTRL-SPACE removes character-level formatting from the selected text (fonts, italics/bold, font size, etc.) but leaves paragraph formatting (indents, line spacing, etc.) intact.ĬTRL-Q leaves fonts and other character formatting intact but reverts paragraph-level formatting to Normal Style of current document.ĬTRL-SHIFT-N returns the selected text to Normal formatting, both character-level and paragraph-level.How much time have you wasted fighting to format your Word documents, especially long or complex documents, with the right fonts, indents, and other layout choices? Microsoft Word formatting can be less frustrating when you know how Word works and applies text and layout formatting. At the top of the options is Clear All which clears all formatting and styles from a document. To quickly remove styles, expand Quick Styles to display the list of available styles. You can also select just a few paragraphs and use the same method to remove formatting from part of a document.

Use Ctrl + A to select all text in a document and then click the Clear All Formatting button to remove the formatting from the text (aka character level formatting.) Pro Tip - If you are struggling for more than a few minutes with formatting, it is usually best just to clear out the old formatting and then properly format the resulting clean document. If you use Microsoft Word, you have almost certainly struggled with Word formatting issues, especially using Word documents created by others and edited by many people.

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