Have you ever wondered what that paintbrush icon on your toolbar in any of your Microsoft Office applications actually does? Most likely, you’ve never used it or might be that you’ve not even noticed it. This little paintbrush icon is one of the most underutilized, timesaving features in Microsoft Word. It’s called Format Painter. The Format Painter allows you to copy the formatting from one part of your text to another with a single click. Format includes things such as font, size, font styles (italics, bold, underline), color, effects, shading, borders, indents, bullets, etc. The Format Painter is very helpful in documents that have a variety of different styles used for the text as it eliminates the need to make the changes to the formatting manually, step-by-step, one-by-one.
How to Use the Format Painter in Office 2007
- Select the word or text with formatting you wish to copy.
- Click the Format Painter Tool once from the Clipboard on the Home Tab. This will turn the Format Painter ON and copy the formatting of the text you have selected.
- Move your cursor to the text you wish to apply the new formatting to and click and drag over this text. Click once and you will see the formatting applied on the text.
- If you want to apply the same formatting more than once, select the text with the formatting you want and double-click Format Painter button. You will then be able to select multiple words, sentences, and paragraphs in different parts of your documents. Click once after each selection.
- When you are done making all of your formatting selections, hit the ESC key to turn the Format Painter off.
Note: You can also find the Format Painter in PowerPoint and Excel!Tags: microsoftoffice, Word