You’ll never have to waste time reformatting text that could reformat itself again. Which translates into minutes and hours in the long run. Whether you spend your day writing articles, creating presentation decks, or even just keeping up with your inbox, this quick trick will save you a few seconds here and there. So while it might take a little more time to figure out the best shortcuts in your favorite applications, you can still put in some work upfront to avoid adjusting the formatting every time you paste. Other applications might have their own solutions or allow you to use some sort of outside program or extension to achieve similar results. Hover your mouse over the different options, and you can choose to keep the source formatting, merge the formatting, paste it as a picture, or paste it as plain text ( Figure A ). And in Office, you can click on the little Paste Options button that appears next to the pasted text and hit Match Destination Formatting (which will still keep bold and italics) or Keep Text Only-and you can set one of those as the default way to paste. But, for example, in Chrome and Firefox, you can use Control + Shift + V. On a PC, there’s not a catch-all shortcut that’ll work across every application. Technically, you can also go to Edit and scroll down to Paste and Match Formatting or Paste and Match Style, but who wants to go back to that much mouse clicking? It’s a lot of keys at once, but it’ll quickly become second nature. Instead of Command + V, hit Command + Option + Shift + V. But when foresight turns to hindsight, Find and Replace can help you get the job done.Let’s start with Macs, because it’s easier. That would make changing some of these things more manageable. Now yes, with some foresight, you could have set up character and paragraph styles and then rigorously apply them throughout your document.

For example, say you set specific paragraphs to be aligned to the left and have a particular indentation, and now you want to remove that indentation and center align those paragraphs. You’ve used a particular paragraph formatting (alignment, indentation, spacing, and so on) and you want to change that.For example, say you repeat the phrase “Little Red Riding Hood” throughout your document, and you’ve now decided you’d like that phrase to use a different font and red text.

You have a particular word or phrase to which you want to apply (or change) character formatting.For example, say you used italics for emphasis, and now you want to remove that formatting. You’ve used one type of character formatting throughout your document and want to change it to another type of formatting.

How to keep source formatting in word