How to Remove Character Formats in Word 2013

Word 2010 For Dummies

Word 2013 offers so many formatting commands that it's possible for your text to look more like a pile of formatting remnants than anything that’s readable in any human language. Word understands this problem, so it created the Clear Formatting command to let you peel away all formats from your text, just like you peel the skin from a banana:

To blow away formatting from a block of selected text or the text the insertion pointer is on or future text you type, use the Clear Formatting command button in the Font group. The keyboard shortcut for this command is Ctrl+spacebar.

The Clear Formatting command removes any formats you've applied to the text: font, size, text attributes (bold or italic), color, and so on.

The Clear Formatting command removes the ALL CAPS text format but doesn’t change the case of text you created by using Shift, Caps Lock, or the Change Case command in Word.
Another key combination for Ctrl+spacebar is Ctrl+Shift+Z. Remember that Ctrl+Z is the Undo command. To undo formatting, all you do is add the Shift key, which may make sense — well, heck, if any of this makes sense.
Technically, the Ctrl+spacebar command restores characters to the formatting defined by the style you’re using. So if the Body style is 12-point Calibri, pressing Ctrl+spacebar restores that font and size. Don’t let this information upset or confuse you!

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.