Formatting is contextual. One style may look great in one place, but look horrible in the next. Here are a few quick tips on how to remove unwanted formatting from your documents.
1. How to remove unwanted formatting from your email
If you’ve received an email which has been forwarded multiple times, you’d notice that it can be hard to read if every line is prefixed with on more more ‘>’ characters. Stripmail is a great piece of freeware which will help you strip any unwanted characters from your email and formats it into proper paragraphs and indentation so it’s much easier to read. Stripmail is a free standalone utility which does not require installation so it’s incredibly light and portable.
2. How to remove unwanted formatting from any text in Google Docs AND MS Word and Powerpoint
Want a quick way to remove formatting in your document? Select the text you want to remove formatting from, and click Alt + Spacebar. This built-in function will instantly do the job, and will work both in Google Docs and Microsoft Office.
3. How to remove unwanted formatting from Excel
The Alt + Spacebar trick doesn’t work in Excel, so what you can do is select an already unformatted cell, then click on the format painter button, and then select the area which you want unformatted.
4. How to remove unwanted formatting when pasting web pages into MS Word
Things you copy from the web tend to end up looking really bad when you paste it into an MS Word file. The way to get around this, once you copy the text, go to MS-Word and click Edit-Paste Special – Unformatted Text. If you tend to do this very often, check out this excellent video tutorial on how to set up this up as a macro.
5. How to remove unwanted formatting when copying from your web browser
Have you ever copied something from your web browser to Outlook or Office and been annoyed that the text formatting (bold, font size, etc) came with it? Don’t you wish you could just copy the text itself, without having to copy it, paste it into notepad, then copy it again? This firefox extension gives you an option to copy text without the formatting. You can even set it to trim extra space in and around the copied text!
How do you deal with unwanted formatting? Tell us in the comments!
These are great tips (I did not know about the Alt + Space for Google Docs and Word) and help greatly when doing web research; especially when copying and pasting blocks of text.
These are great tips!
I had someone request a custom app at my blog to take any and all formatting out the contents of the clipboard via a hotkey press.
I didn’t post it because i didn’t think too many people would have a need for it, but maybe i should put it up.
Great read.
@Trinae & John-Paul: That’s great, so glad I could help!
nice one!i never think deeply about this before ;)
Great tips! The last two will be especially useful to me.
One thing I’ve done a lot is simply paste the lot into notepad (which I have a shortcut key to open quickly) and then cut and paste it again out of there.
And a great little freeware utility that I’ve used over the years is FormatClip… but hey, I can’t find it in Google! Maybe I dreamt it!