How to Rapidly Copy Text Styles Using the Format Painter in Microsoft Word

When formatting a long document in Microsoft Word, you might spend five minutes perfectly styling a section header—changing the font to Arial, making it bold, bumping the size to 14pt, and adding a dark blue text color. If you need to apply that exact same complex styling to 20 other section headers throughout a 50-page report, manually repeating those five steps every single time is incredibly tedious. To solve this, you can use the Format Painter tool, which copies the style of your text rather than the text itself.

How to Use the Format Painter Once

The Format Painter is designed to take the formatting from one location and “paint” it over another location.

1. Highlight the text that has the perfect formatting you want to copy (e.g., your perfectly styled blue section header).
2. Navigate to the Home tab on the main ribbon menu.
3. In the far-left “Clipboard” group, click the Format Painter button (it looks like a small yellow paintbrush).
4. Notice that your mouse cursor has now changed to include a tiny paintbrush icon.
5. Scroll through your document, find the text you want to change, and click and drag your mouse to highlight it.

The moment you release the mouse button, the unformatted text will instantly transform to perfectly match the font, size, color, and paragraph alignment of your original text. The paintbrush cursor will then disappear, returning to normal.

The Double-Click Trick for Multiple Paste Operations

The standard single-click method described above turns the Format Painter off immediately after one use. If you need to apply that heading style to 20 different headers scattered across a massive document, turning the tool on and off 20 times is frustrating.

To lock the Format Painter in the “ON” position, you must use the double-click trick.

1. Highlight your perfectly formatted source text.
2. Navigate to the Format Painter button on the ribbon, but this time, double-click it rapidly.

This simple action locks the paintbrush tool to your cursor. You can now scroll down to page 2 and paint a header. The paintbrush will remain active. You can scroll to page 5 and paint another header. The paintbrush will still remain active. You can continue painting text endlessly throughout the entire document.

When you are finally finished formatting the document, you must manually turn the tool off. You can either press the Esc (Escape) key on your keyboard, or simply click the Format Painter button on the ribbon one more time to deactivate it.