The short version
Single-click the Format Painter and it applies your formatting once. Double-click it and it stays locked on, so you can paint as many spots as you want. Press Esc when you are done.
This may seem stupid to those of you who already know it. However, I stumbled onto something in Word that I did not know, and I have been using Word for a very long time.
Here is the situation. I created a document, formatted one piece of text the way I wanted it, and then needed a bunch of other text scattered through the doc to match. I did not want to do them one at a time.
The Way I Was Doing It (Wrong, Apparently)
When you want to copy the formatting of some text, you highlight it and click the little paint brush on the Home tab of the Ribbon. That is the Format Painter.
Then you select the target text where you want that formatting applied, and “automagically” it has the same formatting.
The catch is that a single click is a one-shot deal. Once you paint the target, the brush turns itself off. So when I needed the same formatting in multiple places, my workflow looked like this:
- Select the source text.
- Click the paint brush.
- Select the target text.
- Go back and select the source text again.
- Click the paint brush again.
- Repeat until annoyed.
The Fix: Double-Click the Paint Brush
If you highlight the source text and then double-click the paint brush, it locks the Format Painter on. Now you can go through the whole document and select every piece of target text you want, one after another, without ever going back to the source.
- Select the text that already has the formatting you want.
- Double-click the Format Painter on the Home tab. The button stays highlighted and your cursor picks up a little paint brush.
- Select each piece of target text. Every selection gets the formatting.
- Press Esc, or click the Format Painter once more, to turn it off.
Gotcha: while the painter is locked, every click or drag in the document paints. If you click somewhere just to read or reposition, you will reformat whatever you touched. Hit Esc first, and remember Undo is your friend.
What Actually Gets Copied
What the painter picks up depends on what you select as the source:
| Source selection | What is copied |
|---|---|
| A few words inside a paragraph | Character formatting only: font, size, color, bold, italic, underline, highlight |
| An entire paragraph, including the paragraph mark at the end | Character formatting plus paragraph formatting: alignment, indents, line spacing, spacing before and after, bullets and numbering |
| A shape, text box, or picture | Object formatting such as fill, outline, and border |
Tip: turn on the Show/Hide paragraph marks button on the Home tab so you can see whether you grabbed the paragraph mark or not. That one invisible character is the difference between “copy the font” and “copy the font and the whole paragraph layout.”
Keyboard Shortcuts (and a Gotcha)
You can skip the mouse entirely. Copy the formatting with one shortcut, then paste it onto as many selections as you like. The copied formatting sticks around until you copy a different one, so this works like the locked painter without the risk of painting something by accident.
The gotcha: Microsoft changed these shortcuts in current Microsoft 365 builds of Word, because Control + Shift + V was reassigned to Paste Text Only. Which set you have depends on your version.
| Action | Current Word (Windows) | Current Word (Mac) | Older Word (Windows) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Copy formatting | Control + Alt + C | Command + Option + C | Control + Shift + C |
| Paste formatting | Control + Alt + V | Command + Option + V | Control + Shift + V |
| Turn off a locked Format Painter | Esc | Esc | Esc |
If you press Control + Shift + V expecting your formatting and get plain text instead, you are on the newer build. Use the Alt (or Option) versions.
It Is Not Just Word
The same double-click lock works on the Format Painter in Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. In Excel it is great for pushing number formats, borders, and fills across scattered cells. In PowerPoint it will carry shape and text box formatting from slide to slide.
When the Format Painter Is the Wrong Tool
The painter is perfect for a one-off cleanup. If you are doing the same thing over and over, there are better options:
- Styles. If the formatting repeats throughout the document, make it a Style. Change the Style once and every instance updates. This is the right answer for anything longer than a couple of pages.
- Select Text with Similar Formatting. On the Home tab, go to Select and choose Select Text with Similar Formatting. Word grabs every matching chunk at once, and you can reformat them all in one move.
- Repeat Last Action. Apply a formatting change, select the next piece of text, and press F4 on Windows or Command + Y on Mac to repeat it.
- Find and Replace with formatting. In the Replace dialog, expand More and use the Format button to swap one set of formatting for another across the whole document.
Wrap-Up
One extra click on a button I have been pressing for years, and a tedious chore turns into a quick pass through the document. If you already knew this, carry on. If you did not, you are welcome.
