Do you struggle with styles in Word? Copy and Pasting from one document to another?

Here’s a tip for you…

Word Options!

If you are quick with your copying and pasting and you do lots of it, then I am sure you are aware of the ‘Paste Special’ option in the Edit menu, and you choose unformatted text, which removes all the formating from where you copied the text.

Being able to strip formatting from text and pasting it ‘plain’ has its uses, but for times, when you want it to take on the formatting of a paragraph, or document ‘paste as unformatted text’ and then applying your formatting/styles is just one way to go.

There is a feature available in MS Word.

The feature – Match Destination Formatting. It’s a simple matter of changing a setting in Word Options and all text loses its source formatting to take on what’s there in the open document file. Here’s how you do it:

1. From the Office button – click on Word Options at the bottom to open the panel.
   
2. Come down to the Advanced feature on the left. Within it, the second section is for Cut, copy and paste which lists the four options – Pasting within the same document, Pasting between documents, Pasting between documents when style definitions conflict and Pasting from other programs.
3. Change the default of Keep Source Formatting to Match Destination Formatting. Alternatively to paste text without any formatting, you can also choose Keep Text Only. Click OK and that’s it.
   

When you do the above steps in Word Options, it will be applied to all your Word Documents from here on…