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Why doesn't't 'Clear Formatting' clear the formatting?

Anonymous
2013-05-23T09:31:35+00:00

For as long as I can remember (over 25 years using Word for Mac) when you highlight some text to apply a Style, it often doesn't apply it correctly unless you first select 'Clear Formatting' in the drop down menu top left.  Furthermore, when you select 'Clear Formatting', there often seems to be some text that doesn't respond to that either!  Why is this?  Is there any way to reliably get  selected text to revert to 'Normal' so that I can apply the style I want?

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  1. Anonymous
    2013-05-23T16:30:40+00:00

    Okay, so it's data that's been pasted in from a source other than a Word document. In that case it's probably caused by some formatting characters that Word just doesn't recognize. 

    For the most part Word does recognize current HTML formatting from text in websites but I would imagine that there might be some special formatting that it doesn't.

    In any event I believe the best practice is to always Paste Special > Unformatted Text when brining in something from other sources, I prefer that method even between Word documents when I want to make sure my current document holds it styles pure and doesn't pickup extraneous ones.

    With that said, if Paste Special is not working or Clear Formatting (and what I mean by "not working" is clearing extraneous formatting that you wish wasn't there) then you can also try first pasting the copied text into a Text Editor and then moving it from there into your Word document.

    Hope this helps

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  1. Anonymous
    2013-05-23T12:55:09+00:00

    I always imagined that 'Clear Formatiing' should return the text to 'Normal' style, but it often fails to clear tabs, paragraph formatiing and font formatiing.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-05-23T12:28:27+00:00

    I am aware of it not removing the following:

    • Highlighting,
    • Hyperlinks (the character styling is removed but not the actual link),
    • Bookmarks,
    • The formatting on Text in Text-boxes (unless you individually select the text box and then choose Clear Formatting), this applies to WordArt also,
    • The numbers and bullets in lists if they were inserted manually, for example, by adding a "1." to the beginning of a sentence and not using a list style.

    All of the above are by design... Clear Formatting does not remove them.

    Are there others situations that you can share?

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-05-23T15:01:29+00:00

    The font often won't revert to the Normal font.  Paragraphs will often not revert to the Normal Style settings of single line spacing with no space above or below paragraphs.

    Try copying a piece of text from a website or pdf document into a Word document and then selecting 'Clear Formatting' and you'll see what I mean.

    It's been like this for 25 years to my knowledge, so I'm not expecting any quick answers!  But it would be useful to know if there is some better way to get text back to Normal style easily.

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-05-23T14:18:09+00:00

    You are correct about Tabs if they are embedded in the paragraph, I should have added that to my list. Leading Tabs or Indentation should be removed by a Clear Formatting command.

    What type of paragraph or font formatting are you not seeing removed? I have not experienced that unless the paragraph is embedded in a Textbox and the text box is not first selected.

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