Let’s say you’ve just applied various formatting options to text, for example you might have selected bold, italic, underline; changed font and size of font; applied a different colour, added borders and shading, and even adjusted different line spacing. Now you would like to quickly reproduce this formatting in several places in your document.

You can save time by copying the format you’ve already applied to text using Format Painter. To do so follow these steps:

1. Select the text that has the formatting that you want to duplicate.
2. On the ribbon from Home tab, in Clipboard, click the Format Painter button. When you move from the Ribbon back to the document, the mouse pointer now appears as I-beam with a paint brush.
3. Select the text you want to reformat by dragging the mouse to highlight the text.
4. As soon as you release the mouse button, the text receives the format of the other text. The feature is turned off and the mouse pointer returns to the original default pointer.

If you have several pieces of the text throughout the document that you want to reformat, then follow steps 1 to 3, however in step 2, double click the Format Painter button and select text to format those pieces of text. When you’re finished, click the Format Painter button to turn it off.

Want more tips? Click on Microsoft Word Tips & Tricks