It’s important to know how to clear the formatting in Microsoft Word. It’s a quickfire way of ensuring that you start from a clean slate.
I’m sure that you had the problem before, you try to format some text and it just doesn’t go. You click here, there and everywhere and it just doesn’t fix the issue. So let’s go through one of, in my opinion, the most important little buttons in the whole of Microsoft Word – the Clear All Formatting Button.
The Big Powerful Little Button
When you have a bunch of text that you want to either start over, or simply want to clear when inserting from another document, the easiest thing to do is to simply do the following:
Take a look at the following text. You can see that it has loads of different changes in font, style, and color. I want to change that to have a simple, clean bit of text that is set to the normal style that is default.
These are the steps you need to go through in order to clear the formatting:
- Highlight the text.
- Navigate to the Home tab in the ribbon and click on the Clear All Formatting Button in the Font section.
- Your text will revert to a clean a clear text. (Apart from one little thing).
- If you prefer keyboard shortcuts you can simply press Ctrl + Space whilst the text is highlighted.
What the Clear All Formatting Does – and What It Doesn’t Do
As you can see, what I did almost worked but not quite. And that is because there is a difference between text and highlights. What the Clear All Formatting does is that it affects the actual text. Highlights may surround the text, but they are not actually the text.
If you look closely, you will see that the word that I had in color: consequat was changed back into the normal text color that I wanted, black. However, the work aliqua, with the yellow background highlight, wasn’t. The reason for this is clear straight away and to be honest, I don’t think that Microsoft have covered themselves in glory by making this distinction. However, this is what we have, and we have to work with it.
Clear All Formatting clears everything from the text itself – not the background.
This is why the button doesn’t work for the highlight but does for the text color.
Now let’s get rid of the background/ highlight color:
To Remove the Background Color
- Highlight the text – you can even highlight the words before and after. You don’t need to be exact here if you want the same color before and after.
- Click on the Text Highlight Color button and select the No color option:
- And the background color highlight is removed:
What Happens When You Have Lots of Color Highlights?
When you have lots of text that you want to remove the different formatting it’s pretty easy to do as we have said. Just highlight the text and then hit the Clear All Formatting button. However, when it comes to color highlights, they are often all over the document in many different places. You can obviously go through each occasion one by one and remove the color. However, that is definitely not very efficient and is time consuming.
Therefore it would be better if you could simply highlight the relevant text and then apply the highlight removal to all of them at once.
To Quickly Find and Highlight Highlighted Text Do the Following:
- Click on the Advanced Find button:
- The Selection Box opens and you have to select advanced options:
- Click on the Replace tab and click on the Find what selection box
- Do the same with the Replace with box. You may have to click the Highlight option a few times in order to ensure that in the Replace with box the text underneath shows Not highlight:
- Click on Replace All.
- And you will have removed all the different color highlights in the document.
The other way to do this is simpler. Since all we are trying to do is remove the color across the document you can highlight all the text by pressing Ctrl + A and then navigate to the Text Highlight Color button and select No Color from there:
Removing All the Formatting from Word Documents
Learning how to remove formatting in a word document is an important skill to have. I hope that this has been helpful and instructive to you showing you how to remove the formatting and giving you a nice, clean document. If you have any questions, let me know and I’ll do my best to answer them.