Word's format painter

Microsoft Office programmes are pretty much - to mix a metaphor - the lingua franca of business. And, if we are writing a document, it is MS Word we use. 

Most of the time, things go smoothly. But every now and again I will run into a problem where the formatting in Word goes glitchy, and not even undo will get me out of trouble. 

That is where the format painter tool often gets me out of trouble. Located in the home ribbon, in the Clipboard section of that toolbar, I simply highlight the formatting I want copied in my document, and click the paintbrush (aka format painter) tool to 'copy' it; then position my mouse over my troublesome text to 'paste' the formatting and enter. That usually ends the problem. 

However, there are a couple of extra tricks. 

• Firstly, hot keys. We can key Alt, Ctrl and C on the keyboard to copy a format, and Alt, Ctrl V to paste it. Too easy. And if we use the hotkeys, we can repeatedly re-paste the copied formatting to many areas without needing to re-copy (Microsoft Support, 2019)
• Secondly, to stop formatting, key ESC (Microsoft Support, 2019)
• Thirdly, toggling on the pilcrow symbol on the Word Home ribbon (¶) will allow us to see our paragraph marks. If we highlight entire paragraphs including our paragraph marks, then copy formatting, we can paste paragraph formatting around our document as well (Indeed, 2025).

But note that the format painter tool will not copy the background cell colours in a table.

Sam

References:

Indeed. (2025, March 27). How To Use Format Painter in Word (With Tips). https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/how-to-use-format-painter-in-word

Microsoft Support. (2019, July 07). Use the Format Painter. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-the-format-painter-4bb415a9-d4e4-42b7-b579-170adc594e40