The Spontaneous Resizing
Google Docs relies heavily on an internal system called “Styles” (like Normal text, Heading 1, Heading 2). These styles dictate the font, weight, and crucially, the text size. Sometimes, you might highlight a paragraph and manually change its text size from 11pt to 14pt. However, if you subsequently copy and paste text from another document, or sometimes simply press Enter to start a new paragraph, Google Docs will automatically revert the text size back to the default 11pt defined by the “Normal text” style. This constant battle against the default styles makes formatting a custom document incredibly tedious.
Updating the Master Style
To ensure your preferred formatting sticks permanently and stop Google Docs from automatically changing your text size back to the default, you must update the master Style definition to match your newly selected size.
Open your Google Docs document. First, highlight a sentence that you have already manually formatted to the exact text size (and font) that you want to use throughout the document. Leaving it highlighted, look at the top toolbar. You will see a dropdown menu that probably says Normal text. Click on this dropdown. In the menu that appears, hover your cursor over “Normal text.” A secondary menu will slide out to the right. In this secondary menu, click on Update ‘Normal text’ to match. By doing this, you are instructing Google Docs that your new text size is the new default. From now on, whenever you type new paragraphs, they will automatically adhere to your chosen text size.