Docs · guide
By Alberto Gulotta · Updated · 12 min read
To remove formatting in Word, select the text and choose Home › Clear All Formatting. Microsoft’s first step is about the selection: “Select the text that you want to return to its default formatting.” From the keyboard there is no single command — Ctrl+Spacebar clears the characters, Ctrl+Q clears the paragraph, and each leaves the other alone.
| Where you are working | What the command is called | Microsoft’s own instruction |
|---|---|---|
| Word or Publisher on Windows | Clear All Formatting | “On the Home tab, select Clear All Formatting in the Font group.” |
| Word on a Mac | Clear All Formatting | The same tab and the same group, under a heading of its own, Clear formatting from text |
| Word in a browser | Clear Formatting, without the “All” | “you may have to select More (...) to see the additional buttons” |
| Outlook classic, writing a message | Clear All Formatting | “On the Message tab, Clear All Formatting in the Basic Text group” |
| Any of them, from the keyboard | It has no single shortcut | The shortcut list carries “Remove manual character formatting. Ctrl+Spacebar” and “Remove paragraph formatting. Ctrl+Q” |
The button is not in Microsoft’s shortcut list, and the two shortcuts that are do half a job each
“Remove manual character formatting. Ctrl+Spacebar” — and, in a different block of the same list, “Remove paragraph formatting. Ctrl+Q”.
Microsoft’s Keyboard shortcuts in Word was read in full and counted on 25 September 2026: nearly 10,000 words of shortcuts, and “Clear All Formatting” not once. The command every guide points at has no entry in the list of shortcuts, and the two entries that come closest are split down the middle — one for characters, one for paragraphs.
That does not mean Ctrl+Spacebar fails to clean anything. It means Microsoft, when it names that key, calls what it removes “manual character formatting”: manual, and character. An indent is neither. A heading style is neither. A university IT guide read the same day, from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, offers them as the same thing — “Home > Clear All Formatting (the eraser icon) or press Ctrl+Spacebar” — and that is exactly where a reader decides the command is broken.
One more entry from the same list is worth knowing before you guess at a shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+Q is not a clearing command at all. Microsoft’s line for it is “Change the selected text to the Symbol font”, which turns a paragraph into Greek letters and symbols.
“This action applies only to formatting that you have added or modified. It doesn’t apply to default page layout styles, such as slide headers or bullet styles, that you haven’t modified.”
Its examples, slide headers and bullet styles, are PowerPoint’s. For Word, the sentence to go by is the one at the top of the same page: the text goes back to its default formatting styles, and on a heading that means Normal.
It is the cleanest paste and the most destructive one: “Graphical elements are discarded, and tables are converted to a series of paragraphs.”
If the thing you pasted was a table you wanted, Merge Formatting is the middle option: it “discards most formatting that was applied directly to the copied text” and keeps bold and italic where they carry emphasis.
By Microsoft’s own account Word keeps the original formatting unless you tell it otherwise, and that default is a setting: File, Options, Advanced, under “Cut, copy, and paste”.
There are four of them, not one — pasting inside a document, between documents, between documents when the styles clash, and from other programs.
There is a third route, and it is the one to use on a document somebody else formatted. SIUE’s guide sends you from the Styles dialog box launcher to Word’s Style Inspector, where you “Examine the formatting information and remove unwanted formatting” with its Clear buttons. That is slower than the button, and it is the only one of the three that lets you look before anything is removed.
Six sentences from the documentation, and what each one settles
Three Microsoft Support pages and one university IT guide, all read in full on 25 September 2026.
Where this answer stops. The three Microsoft pages are not written for the same set of products, and the difference matters if you are not on a Windows desktop. “Clear all text formatting” covers Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, OneNote and Publisher, but only two Mac versions of Word: Word for Microsoft 365 for Mac and Word 2019 for Mac. “Control the formatting when you paste text” names five products, all of them Windows, and no Mac at all. The shortcut list is the widest of the three: it declares Word for iPad, Word for iPhone and Word for Android alongside the desktops.
Four ways in.
Clear All Formatting sends the text back to its default formatting styles, and on a heading that means back to Normal.
Microsoft’s shortcut list, nearly 10,000 words long, does not contain the words Clear All Formatting: what it has is Ctrl+Spacebar for characters and Ctrl+Q for paragraphs.
Keep Text Only is the cleanest paste and the most destructive: Microsoft says it turns tables into a series of paragraphs.
When the button takes too much, the Style Inspector lets you examine the formatting first and clear only what you choose.
Not covered here. It does not cover removing formatting in Google Docs.
It does not cover Find and Replace on formatting, which is how you change one font everywhere rather than strip it.
And it does not cover the tracked changes a clean-up leaves behind: if the document is being reviewed, clearing formatting is itself a change somebody will see. What holds instead is simple: the count on this page was made on the day it names, on the page read from top to bottom, and where a guide and the documentation disagree both sentences are printed with the name of each.
Written by Alberto Gulotta
Founder and editor of AI Tools Primer, writing from Palermo, Italy. Thirty-five years of taking computers apart, starting with a Commodore 64 — the long version is on the about page.
Something wrong on this page? Write to aitoolsprimer@gmail.com and it gets fixed.
Written on 25 September 2026.
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