Format Painter Messes Up Ordinals

When Grant types ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.), Word automatically superscripts the letters following the numbers. If he later uses Format Painter from somewhere in his document to "paint" a revised format to a paragraph containing the ordinals, Word removes the superscripting. Grant's intent in using the Format Painter is to update the paragraph indent, margins, tab positions, line spacings, etc. He wonders if there is some way for Format Painter to not change the ordinals or to easily format the ordinals again.

Microsoft gives absolutely no hard-and-fast guidelines for how Format Painter does its work, but there are a few gems we've been able to garner. The biggest gem for Grant's purposes is this: Don't select the paragraph you want to paint. From Grant's description, this is probably what he is doing:

1. Select the paragraph to be used as the origin for the Format Painter. This is the paragraph that will be "copied from."
2. Click the Format Painter.
3. Select the paragraph to which the format should be copied.

Sounds simple, right? Except doing it this way copies all the character formatting as well as the paragraph formatting. Apparently, selecting text—even an entire paragraph—leads the Format Painter to believe you want to copy character formatting as well as the paragraph formatting. To get around this, follow these steps, instead:

1. Place the insertion point in the paragraph to be used as the origin for the Format Painter. Don't select any text in the paragraph; just click once in the paragraph so the insertion point is there.
2. Click the Format Painter.
3. Click once in the paragraph to which you want the formatting applied.

That's it; the character formatting that was applied to the ordinals should remain undisturbed, along with any other explicitly applied character formatting in the paragraph.

A second way to copy just the paragraph formatting is one that has been used since the very earliest days of Word, before the Format Painter even existed. Follow these steps:

1. Make sure that non-printing characters are displayed on screen. (If they are displayed, you should see a pilcrow—a backwards P—displayed at the end of each paragraph.)
2. Select just the end-of-paragraph marker (that pilcrow character) from the source paragraph.
3. Press Ctrl+C. The marker is now copied to the Clipboard.
4. Select just the end-of-paragraph marker for the target paragraph.
5. Press Ctrl+V. The paragraph formatting from the source paragraph is now copied to the target paragraph.

These steps work because that end-of-paragraph marker contains all of the paragraph formatting for whatever paragraph it belongs to. If you copy the marker, you copy the formatting. Pasting it as a replacement in a target paragraph replaces all the paragraph formatting.

Finally, no self-respecting tip about paragraph formatting would be complete without mentioning that you can save time and effort by using styles instead of copying and pasting formatting. If you create a paragraph style that is applied to your paragraphs, you can later change the style and all the paragraphs to which that style has been applied will be changed, automatically, to reflect the new style changes—without affecting any formatting done to individual characters such as the ordinals in Grant's paragraphs.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13878) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365.