How to Clear Formatting in Word, Including Pasted Text

To clear formatting in Word, select the text and choose Clear All Formatting (the A with an eraser) in the Font group on the Home tab. It removes fonts, sizes, colors, bold and other direct formatting and returns the text to the Normal style. To avoid the problem in the first place, paste with Ctrl+Shift+V, which pastes text only. Copying from websites, emails and PDFs is where the mess comes from: five fonts, grey boxes, blue underlined links. And Clear All Formatting does not remove everything, which is why cleanup takes longer than it should. Knowing what stays behind is what makes it a one-pass job.

What Clear All Formatting Removes, and What It Leaves

Microsoft's guide to clearing text formatting describes it as removing formatting such as bold, underline, italics, color, superscript and subscript and returning text to its default style. In practice:

Check what's applied first

Select a problem paragraph and press Ctrl+D to open the Font dialog. It shows the font, size and effects in use. If you select several paragraphs and the font box is blank, more than one font is mixed in. That one check tells you whether a font change is enough or the whole block needs clearing.

Clear Formatting Button and Shortcuts

Select the range and click Clear All Formatting. Pressing Ctrl+A first clears the whole document, but that also turns every heading into Normal text. To keep your structure, select only body text, or use the shortcuts that clear one layer at a time:

• Ctrl+Space: removes direct character formatting (font, size, color, bold). Styles stay.
• Ctrl+Q: resets paragraph formatting (indents, spacing, alignment) to the style's settings.
• Ctrl+Shift+N: applies the Normal style.

Ctrl+Space is the right tool when a pasted heading has the wrong color: it strips the color but leaves Heading 1 in place.

On a Mac, Clear All Formatting sits in the same place on the Home tab. In Word for the web, the Clear Formatting button is on the Home tab; on a narrow window, select More (...) to find it.

Paste Without Formatting

Preventing the mess is faster than cleaning it. According to Microsoft's paste formatting guide, Word keeps the original formatting by default when you paste with Ctrl+V. The three paste options are:

• Keep Source Formatting (K): brings the source font, color and shading. Use it when the original design matters.
• Merge Formatting (M): matches the destination but keeps emphasis such as bold and italic.
• Keep Text Only (T): characters only, in the formatting of the paragraph you paste into. Best for web content.

Ctrl+Shift+V pastes text only in current Microsoft 365. If you already pasted with Ctrl+V, press Ctrl right away, then T, to switch that paste to Keep Text Only.

Change the default paste

To make web content always arrive clean, go to File > Options > Advanced > Cut, copy, and paste and set Pasting from other programs to Keep Text Only. Pasting between Word documents has its own settings in the same section. If the Paste Options button never appears, turn on Show Paste Options button when content is pasted there.

Remove What Clear Formatting Leaves Behind

Shading and highlighting

If a grey background survives, check which kind it is. Color only behind the characters is highlighting; a box spanning the paragraph width is shading. Remove shading from the Shading dropdown in the Paragraph group with No Color.

Highlighting is not removed by Clear All Formatting. Select the text and choose Text Highlight Color > No Color. If a colleague used highlights as notes, note which sentences were marked before you remove them.

Borders, links and tables

• Lines around paragraphs: choose No Border from the Borders dropdown in the Paragraph group.
• Hyperlinks: select the text and press Ctrl+Shift+F9 to turn links into plain text. For a single link, right-click it and choose Remove Hyperlink. Ctrl+Shift+F9 converts every field in the selection, including page numbers and cross-references, so select only the paragraphs with links.
• Text that arrived inside a table: depending on how a web page is built, its content can paste inside a table. Select the table and use Table Layout > Convert to Text.

Spacing still looks off

If paragraphs are still too far apart or indented after clearing, open the Paragraph dialog and set indents to 0 and spacing to your standard. If text keeps reverting to an odd font after clearing, the Normal style itself was changed in that document. Pasting the text with Ctrl+Shift+V into a new document is usually faster than fixing the style.

👉 How to Change Line Spacing in Word, Paragraph Spacing Too

Bring the Document onto One Style

After clearing, apply Normal to body text and Heading 1 and Heading 2 to headings. Then pick a heading and body font pair from Design > Fonts, and the whole document follows. Paragraphs with a directly applied font ignore theme fonts, so clear first, then choose the theme.

👉 How to Use Heading Styles in Word (and Fix Them)

Worked Example: Cleaning Up an Approved Supplier Handbook

The purchasing team at Lakeview Distribution keeps an Approved Supplier Handbook for warehouse and accounts payable staff: each supplier's ordering rules, delivery windows, return policy and contacts. It was built over two years by pasting from supplier websites, email replies and PDF terms, including Northgate Supply's portal and Ridgeline Manufacturing's terms sheet. It now has five fonts, grey boxes behind quoted policies, yellow highlights used as notes and blue links everywhere.

1. Fix the paste default first. Set Pasting from other programs to Keep Text Only, so new material arrives in the handbook's own formatting.
2. Save the notes. Before touching the highlights, the purchasing lead pages through and copies the highlighted sentences into a short list; some are open questions for suppliers.
3. Clear body text in sections. Select each supplier's body text, without the supplier name, and click Clear All Formatting.
4. Remove what's left. Text Highlight Color > No Color for highlights, Shading > No Color for grey boxes, and Ctrl+Shift+F9 on the link-heavy paragraphs. Ridgeline's terms had pasted inside a one-column table, which Convert to Text turns back into paragraphs.
5. Rebuild the structure. Heading 1 for supplier names, Heading 2 for "Ordering", "Delivery" and "Returns", Normal for the rest, then a theme font pair from the Design tab.
6. Check in the Navigation pane. Every supplier should appear as a Heading 1 with its sections underneath.

The step people repeat needlessly is 4: clicking Clear All Formatting again and again when grey remains. Highlighting, links and tables are not its job. Once cleaned, the handbook stays clean because new pastes arrive as text.

FAQ

Q. What is the shortcut to clear formatting in Word?

There is no single shortcut for Clear All Formatting. Ctrl+Space clears character formatting and Ctrl+Q clears paragraph formatting; together they do the same job. Add Ctrl+Shift+N to set the Normal style.

Q. Why is there still a grey background after clearing formatting?

It is highlighting or table cell shading. Color behind characters only: Text Highlight Color > No Color. A whole cell filled: Table Design > Shading > No Color.

Q. How do I always paste without formatting?

Set File > Options > Advanced > Pasting from other programs to Keep Text Only. For a one-time paste, use Ctrl+Shift+V.

Q. Clearing formatting turned my headings into body text. How do I undo that?

Press Ctrl+Z, then select only the body text and clear again, or use Ctrl+Space to strip character formatting while keeping heading styles.

Clean Documents with inline AI

Moving content gathered from websites, emails and PDFs into your company format, and removing the leftover highlighting, shading and links, is work inline AI takes on. inline AI opens web pages and company files side by side, edits the Word document directly, brings only what you need into your template, and adds the sources as footnotes.