Removing All Formatting from a Document

Vera received a document that she needs to edit and format. However, the document's current formatting is really messed up, including dozens and dozens of styles that are not needed. She has concluded that the easiest way to work with this document is to get rid of all the formatting, but Vera can't figure out how to get rid of the unnecessary styles. She wonders about the easiest way to get the text in the document back to "ground zero" so she can work with it from the ground up.

If you have worked with Word for a while (as it appears Vera has), then you know that there are two general types of formatting in Word—formatting that is applied explicitly (typically using tools on the Home tab of the ribbon) and formatting that is applied implicitly (using styles).

Getting rid of the explicit formatting is rather easy. For a simple document, just press Ctrl+A (this selects everything), then press Ctrl+Spacebar (this removes all character formatting) and Ctrl+Q (this removes all paragraph formatting). When I say "removes" in relation to Ctrl+Spacebar and Ctrl+Q, I mean that the explicit formatting is removed and the underlying formatting used by the applied styles is what is left.

Vera apparently wants to go beyond this, though, because she mentions lots of unnecessary styles. Here's how I would suggest getting back to absolutely ground zero. I'm going to assume in these steps that Vera has a desired template that she wants to use with the document.

1. Open the problem document. (I'll call this the source document.)
2. Open a brand new, blank document. (I'll call this the target document.)
3. Attach your desired template to the target document.
4. In the source document, press Ctrl+A to select everything.
5. Press Ctrl+C. This copies everything to the Clipboard.
6. In the target document, use Paste Special to paste the contents of the Clipboard as Unformatted Text.

If you think that the source document may be too large to fit into the Clipboard fully (it would need to be really, really large!), then you can follow these steps:

1. Open the problem document.
2. Press F12. Word displays the Save As dialog box.
3. Using the Save As Type drop-down list, choose Plain Text (*.txt) as your file type.
4. Click Save. Word displays the File Conversion dialog box.
5. Click OK. Word saves the problem document as a text document, using the TXT filename extension.
6. Close the problem document without saving.
7. Locate and open the plain-text document you saved in step 5.
8. Attach your desired template to the document.
9. Press F12. Word again displays the Save As dialog box.
10. Using the Save As Type drop-down list, choose Word Document (*.docx) as your file type.
11. Provide a new name for your document, different from the name used for the problem document.
12. Click Save.

Regardless of which approach you use, what you end up with is a document with no formatting, but with your desired styles (from the template) available to use. You can now go through the target document and apply your formatting as desired.

There is something to realize about this approach—not everything may make it from the problem document to the target document. When you copy only the text, there are a lot of things that aren't included. For instance, you won't see images or other graphic elements. This means that any text in text boxes or shapes won't make the transition, nor will headers, footers, footnotes, endnotes, fields, links, or hyperlinks. Plus, tables, if they make it to the target document, may be messed up.

For this reason, it will be beneficial to open the problem document and the target document at the same time. Then you can compare the target document to the source document and see if there are things you want to recreate in the target document. That's important, though—you'll want to recreate the elements, not copy them. If you really need to copy and paste any missing information, you'll want to do the pasting as "text only" to avoid getting problem formatting copied over.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (6199) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021.