Is there a way to take a long document that has a fair amount of formatting—indents, lists, some type that is tied to weird leading, etc., and strip it of all formatting?. Or set it back to the Word default? If it matters, I have a Mac.
If there is not, is there a way, at least, to reset everything in the document to the default as far as indenting goes?
Thank you.
Select all the document (Ctrl-A)
Copy all the document (Ctrl-C)
Open a new document (Ctrl-N)
Paste without formatting (Edit - Paste Special - Unformatted Unicode Text)
What about copying the whole document (ctl-A), then repasting it as unformatted text?
Maybe before you do that, select all, turn bullets on, turn bullets off, do the hokey pokey, repeat for bold, italics, etc.
Or selecting all and turning on/off the individual formatting elements you want to get rid of.
In my copies of Word (v2002 and v2003 on a PC) I can bring up [ Format | Styles and Formatting ] and then select [ Clear Formatting ].
Also, one can always save the document as a simple text file.
Ctrl+A: select all
Ctrl+Q: reset all paragraph formatting (indents, lists, etc.)
Ctrl+Space: reset all character formatting (bold, italic, underline, etc.)
Wait, Select All is Command + A. Quit is Command + Q, which I just did. Ctrl + A or Ctrl + Q don’t do anything. Are you talking about a PC?
Yes, I was talking about a PC – I haven’t used a Mac for many years, but assumed that there would be something similar (if not exactly the same) on a Mac.
Giles, your first idea worked. Rhythmdvl offered the same one.
Duckster, no go.
Thank you to all.
Come to think of it, while we’re at it, I’d appreciate it if someone knew a way to undo the formatting on a couple paragraphs at a time. Again, I’m using a Mac.
Thanks.
OK, let’s go at this from the other direction. Again, I’m on a PC, but you should have similar menus.
Do you have a menu option of Tools > Customize? In Word 2003, this brings up the Customize dialog. Click the Keyboard button, then highlight Format in the left pane. Scroll down in the right pane, and with luck you will see (alphabetically) ResetChar and ResetPara. Pretty obvious what each of those does. If you have a “Current keys:” box below, it should show you the keyboard shortcuts for those commands. Make a note of them and Bob’s your uncle. Select the characters or paragraphs you want to clear, hit your shortcut, and you’re golden.
Again, I’m making some possibly unwarranted assumptions here, but I don’t have a Mac to check, and as I said, versions are often similar. Let me know if any of this works, and good luck!
It works! YOU ARE A GODDESS!!! (Or a GOD!!! if you’re a guy with a misleading moniker.)
Thanks so much. I never knew that little window with all those commands existed.
Glad to help! (I’m a chick.) My keyboard is highly customized via that very useful dialog; I’ve pruned out duplicates and shortcuts for commands I never use, and changed the ones I do use to ones I’m more likely to remember. (For example, I was forever hitting Ctrl+W, Close File, by mistake – rather inconvenient. So I took out the shortcut because I never want to close a file via the keyboard. And who needs three shortcuts for italic? Ctrl+I is the only one I ever use. So goodbye F7 and whatever the other one was; I can use those for other things.)
You can also customize your toolbars there (Don’t use the toolbar buttons for cut/copy/paste? Take 'em out . . . and make room for stuff you do use that isn’t there) and create your own toolbars, and custom menus with their own hotkeys. I learned to do a lot of my customizing from my own guru, but there’s a lot to be learned by just poking around.
That’s all great. Thanks so much. But as you are so knowledgeable about this stuff, let me ask you this. Is there any way to undo the capitalization that appears by inadvertently hitting the cap lock key? Or is there a way to disable it?
Anyone?
On a PC, Shift + F3 toggles through all the capitalization options (all lc, all uc, first letter uc).
Just tried it. Doesn’t work on a Mac. But thanks.
Works for me on Word 2004 for Mac.
I have Word 2004, Verison 11.1, And it doesn’t work. I just get a slow motion version of the normal F3, which is “show all open windows”. I have the latest version of Leopard. I also tried it on a laptop that does not have leopard, and still no go. That’s weird, huh?
The command your looking for is “change case”. You can map it to a keystroke if ou want, or add abutton to a toolbar.
Sadly, in Ofice 2007 they’ve elminated the vast majority of the UI customization capability. The average dummy couldn’t use it, so now the experts can’t have it. Oh well.
You have to have the text highlighted for it to work. THEN you hit Shift F3.
Another fix for your problem would be to use the replace function. Example: if there is a tabbed space at the beginning of each paragraph you would highlight that area and copy it (to copy the imbedded tab) and then pull up replace. Paste the copied tab in the “replace” section and then hit “alt A” which runs the “replace all” function.
And the customize function is in all MS software. It’s done that way so you don’t have 5000 buttons all over the place. It is worth spending 30 minutes scrolling through them to find usefull stuff. The first thing I do in Excel is bring up the “set print area” button.
WTH? are you serious? I would send a strongly worded death threat to MS over that. That’s really screwed up. Is THIS the fix for it?