Do you know what Format Painter in the suite of Microsoft Office Suites does? If you answered “Nope!”, then read on because it’s nothing short of liberating!
Quite simply it’s a 1-click tool that allows you to change sections of text to the same format and font as another section of your document. There are 2 areas where I find this to be very useful:
1) Quickly changing the font of text (one word or large sections) and, 2) Duplicating the exact same format for sections within a document. If you’ve ever wasted time wrestling with Word formatting and uniformity, THIS IS HUGE.
Here’s an example of #2:
Below is a section formatted in the way I want it, and I’m going to want to duplicate this across several sections of the same document.
Title Heading 1
- Example A
- Example B
- Example C
In the interest of simply getting the ideas out of my head and in to the document, I have typed out another section called Title Heading 2 and not yet formatted it in the same style as the first
Title Heading 2
Point D
Point E
Point F
This is where Format Painter is a huge time saver. Here’s what you do:
1) Select Title Heading 1 as this has the first part of the formatting style that I want to duplicate. Then click the Format Painter icon found in the Home Tab.
You will notice that your cursor changes to a tiny paint brush:
2) Simply select the text that you want to format in the same way, in this case Title Heading 2 and it will change that text to the exact same style (font, format, indentation and spacing)
3) Repeat this for the second section of text and you’ve now got 2 sections that are formatted the exact same way and the best part is you didn’t lose your mind in the process.
I have wrestled with formatting in Word for years and can’t believe that I have only now discovered this. If this is new for you as well, it’s a game changer.
Wow! This IS a game changer! I will be sure to remember this one-very helpful! Thanks Richard!