How to Clear Formatting and Remove Styles in Microsoft Word

When you copy and paste text from a website, an old PDF, or a colleague’s heavily stylized document into your own Microsoft Word file, it often ruins your formatting. You suddenly have chaotic paragraphs featuring giant purple fonts, unwanted bolding, bizarre bullet points, and highlight colors that do not match the rest of your clean, professional document. Attempting to manually fix every single sentence is incredibly frustrating. Instead, you can use a single button to strip away all the chaos and return the text to your default format.

How to Clear All Formatting from Text

Microsoft Word includes a dedicated “Clear Formatting” tool that strips away visual styling without deleting the actual words.

1. Open your document in Microsoft Word.
2. Using your mouse, highlight all the chaotic, badly formatted text that you want to fix. (To highlight the entire document at once, press Ctrl + A on Windows or Command + A on a Mac).
3. Click on the Home tab in the main ribbon menu at the top of the screen.
4. Look in the “Font” group (where you usually change the bold and italic settings).
5. Click the Clear All Formatting button. It looks like the capital letter A with a pink eraser angled across it.

Instantly, all the colored fonts, bold styles, weird sizes, and bizarre indents will be completely wiped away. The text will automatically revert to Word’s “Normal” style (which is usually a clean, black, 11pt Calibri or Arial font). The actual words and paragraphs will remain perfectly intact.

How to Prevent Formatting from Pasting

If you know you are about to paste heavily stylized text from a Wikipedia article into your document, you can prevent the formatting from ever infecting your file in the first place.

1. Copy the text from the source website.
2. Go to Microsoft Word and place your cursor where you want the text to appear.
3. Do not press the standard Paste shortcut (Ctrl+V).
4. Instead, look at the very far left side of the Home tab and click the small arrow pointing down directly beneath the giant Paste clipboard icon.
5. A drop-down menu will appear showing several different clipboard icons. Click on the icon showing a clipboard with a giant capital letter A. This is the Keep Text Only option.

The text will instantly paste directly into your document, automatically adopting your current font and stripping away all the website’s original styling before it ever hits the page.

Keyboard Shortcut: If you prefer using your keyboard, you can bypass the menu entirely by pressing Ctrl + Shift + V (Windows) or Option + Shift + Command + V (Mac) to instantly paste as plain text.