Power Users can learn these “Big 3” format removal keystroke shortcutsĬTRL-SPACE removes character-level formatting from the selected text (fonts, italics/bold, font size, etc.) but leaves paragraph formatting (indents, line spacing, etc.) intact.ĬTRL-Q leaves fonts and other character formatting intact but reverts paragraph-level formatting to Normal Style of current document.ĬTRL-SHIFT-N returns the selected text to Normal formatting, both character-level and paragraph-level. Note: To enable copying and pasting between Mac OS X and Windows. At the top of the options is Clear All which clears all formatting and styles from a document. To preserve text formatting when copying and pasting text, select Preserve text formatting. To quickly remove styles, expand Quick Styles to display the list of available styles. You can also select just a few paragraphs and use the same method to remove formatting from part of a document. Use Ctrl + A to select all text in a document and then click the Clear All Formatting button to remove the formatting from the text (aka character level formatting.)
Pro Tip - If you are struggling for more than a few minutes with formatting, it is usually best just to clear out the old formatting and then properly format the resulting clean document. Or, don't use Word to compose text for email messages - maybe use Pages instead, or just compose in Mail.If you use Microsoft Word, you have almost certainly struggled with Word formatting issues, especially using Word documents created by others and edited by many people. Or, use Plain Text formatting and delete those extra spaces. So using TextEdit may be your only solution. This used to be a fundamental difference between Windows and Mac text, but I haven't seen it as an issue in a while. Instead, you get a whole extra line between paragraphs! Maybe Word is using the old carriage return + line feed ending to paragraphs (two characters) instead of just a return (one character). What's even weirder is that when you set the format of your Mail message to plain text, which is what I use, you would expect that line spacing isn't an issue. But it makes sense that pasting through TextEdit works as then TextEdit does handle that formatting.
Strange that Paste and Match Style doesn't work. Then Mail, which doesn't have those formatting options just uses whatever Word sends it through the copy/paste. It looks like Word is setting the line spacing, or the before/after paragraph amount to something other than 0 when you copy.