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!

We’ve previously discussed ways to convert Text to PDF, but what if you wanted to do it the other way around? 

Typically, copying and pasting directly from a PDF file will result in messy globs of unformatted text, making it barely feasible large sections of text. 

PDF Text Online is a free web based service which helps you extract the text, and even reformat it so you can paste it neatly into Word documents and still preserve a lot of the original PDF formatting. 

Simple simple problem?  Simple solution.

Want to make simple edits to PDF files and don’t want to go through the hassle of actually installing software?

PDF Hammer is a website that allows you to edit your PDF files online for free. You don’t need to install any additional software, you can edit PDF documents right now inside your browser.  It’s as simple as that.

PDF Hammer is in beta and currently has the following features:

• Reorder pages
• Delete pages
• Append PDF to another PDF

Note that this works best with minor edits as described above – and if the PDF file you wish to edit is small enough to upload and download quickly.  If you want a more powerful editor or need something computer based, you may want to try some PDF editing freeware which we reviewed previously.