Tip of the Week: Keyboard Shortcuts for Text Formatting

One of the most frustrating parts of working in any word processor is adjusting your text size—especially after you copy and paste content into a document. The formatting gets all out of whack and you’re left to pick up the pieces. One way you can make it easier to fix your formatting is to copy and paste as plain text into the document. We’ll show you how.

Copy and Paste as Plain Text

To be clear, when we say “copy and paste as plain text,” we mean that you’re pasting text without any of its additional formatting.

When you copy and paste as plain text, you’re getting rid of features like bold, italics, underlines, and even text size. All the text will take on the format that’s already in your document, meaning you save a lot of time with just this one simple trick.

The keyboard shortcut is: Ctrl + Shift + V.

If you’re finding that the text still needs a little fine-tuning, perhaps due to an existing problem with the formatting in your document, we have some tips for fixing those issues as well.

Increase and Decrease Text Size with Keyboard Shortcuts

Instead of working through the dropdowns for text size, you can instead use keyboard shortcuts. Here’s how.

To start, you’ll want to highlight the text you want to adjust. Then, you’ll use these keyboard shortcuts. Keep in mind these only work in Microsoft Word; the Google Docs shortcuts are different, and we’ll highlight them below as well:

• For Microsoft Word
  • Increase font size: Ctrl + ] (right bracket)
  • Decrease font size: Ctrl + [ (left bracket)
• For Google Docs
  • Increase font size: Ctrl + Shift + . (period)
  • Decrease font size: Ctrl + Shift + , (comma)

Other Keyboard Shortcuts to Consider

If you’ve got your text size all ironed out, you can then add in bold, italics, or underlines using these keyboard shortcuts:

• Bold: Ctrl + B
• Italic: Ctrl + I
• Underline: Ctrl + U

And finally, if you want to clear text formatting, you can use the shortcut Ctrl + \\ (backslash) or Ctrl + Space.

We hope you find these tips helpful! Be sure to keep an eye on our blog for more in the future.