How to Quickly Remove All Formatting from Text in Microsoft Word

When you copy and paste text into Microsoft Word from a web page, an email, or another document, it almost always brings its original “baggage” with it. You end up with a chaotic document featuring five different font sizes, strange background highlights, weird line spacing, and blue hyperlinks that clash with your carefully designed professional report.

Trying to manually fix this by highlighting sections, changing the font back to Arial, stripping the bold text, and removing highlights one by one is incredibly frustrating. Instead, Microsoft Word has a hidden “nuclear option” that strips everything away and returns your text to a pure, unformatted state instantly.

Method 1: The Clear All Formatting Button (The Easiest Way)

Word has a dedicated button on the main ribbon specifically designed for this exact problem.

1. Use your mouse to highlight the messy text you want to fix. If you want to strip the formatting from the entire document, press Ctrl + A (Windows) or Cmd + A (Mac) to select everything.
2. Ensure you are on the Home tab in the main ribbon.
3. Look in the “Font” group (where you normally change the font size and bold/italic settings).
4. Find the icon that looks like a capital letter ‘A’ with a pink eraser angled across it. This is the Clear All Formatting button.
5. Click it.

Instantly, all the bizarre fonts, colours, highlights, and custom line spacing will vanish. The text will revert to your document’s default “Normal” style (usually Calibri or Arial, size 11, in standard black).

Note: This button strips visual formatting, but it does not remove hyperlinks. If you pasted a blue, underlined web link, the text will turn black, but the clickable link will remain embedded.

Method 2: The Keyboard Shortcut (The Fastest Way)

If you process a lot of text and prefer not to take your hands off the keyboard, you can achieve the exact same result using a powerful shortcut.

1. Highlight the problematic text.
2. Press and hold the Ctrl key, then tap the Spacebar. (On a Mac, use Ctrl + Spacebar, not the Command key).

This shortcut specifically clears character-level formatting (like fonts, bold, and colours). If the text also has weird paragraph formatting (like massive indents or strange line spacing), press Ctrl + Q immediately afterwards to reset the paragraph rules.

Method 3: Paste Without Formatting (The Preventative Way)

The best way to deal with messy formatting is to prevent it from entering your document in the first place. When you copy text from the internet, do not use the standard Ctrl + V to paste.

1. Copy your text from the website.
2. Go to your Word document.
3. Instead of pressing paste, click the bottom half of the large Paste button on the Home ribbon (the part with the small downward arrow).
4. You will see three icons under “Paste Options”. Hover over the third icon (a clipboard with a large letter ‘A’). It will say Keep Text Only.
5. Click that icon.

Word will act as a filter, leaving all the web code, colours, images, and fonts behind in the clipboard. It will only drop the raw, plain words into your document, automatically styling them to match the exact sentence you pasted them into.