Forum Discussion
Styles set but with Direct Formatting
What is the end result you want to achieve? Do you want to change the format of the paragraphs if users have applied direct formatting? Or what should be done with the text?
For example, if you want to remove all direct formatting, select everything in the document and press Control+Q (removes para formatting which is not in the style) and then press Control+SpaceBar (removes font formatting). These shortcuts work on both Word for Windows and Word for Mac.
The objective is to review the direct formatting and if the result is something that is already available in existing style, then to remove the direct formatting. If the direct formatting result is something that happens often, then to create a style for it so that future document does not need to do such direct formatting.
To remove all direct formatting is not ideal because I need to review them.
Thanks for the follow-up. What you are describing is a manual task, I'm afraid. You can't really automate it.
Word has some tools to help simplify the job, though. In Word for Windows, you can instruct the Styles pane to show direct formatting as styles and then you can select that direct formatting in one go.
In the Styles pane (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S), click the Options button and select the three options under Select formatting to show as styles.
Once that is done, you will see entries for direct formatting in the Styles pane and you can choose to select all instances of a particular format. See some examples in the screen shot below.