Sometimes we’re stuck with some wonky text formatting, and we just want to start over with plain text in the default paragraph style. We mention several the manual Word features to handle the issue, but we also create a custom macro to control a few more details of removing all formatting from the current paragraph.
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Remove all text formatting
Several standard keyboard shortcuts in Microsoft Word apply formatting beyond the basic bold, italics, or using styles. Unfortunately, when the formatting gets messed up badly enough, sometimes it’s better to just start over.
Don't tell anyone, but in the past, I copied the offending text into a text editor like Notepad, which doesn’t allow formatted text, and then copied and pasted that text back into my Word document. How's that for annoying?
Ughhh, but it was the "only way" I knew to fix the bad formatting. It's also an example of how we sometimes refuse to find better ways. Fortunately, I learned from my mistakes (mostly ... kind of ... somewhat).
What's the problem?
Working with formatting in Microsoft Word can be a little aggravating at times in part because with can’t see the actual formatting “codes” Word uses. Depending on the type of formatting, Word stores formatting invisibly in the internal representation of the text or in the paragraph mark. If you don’t believe it, copy some paragraph text without its paragraph marker and watch the paragraph—but not any specific character—formatting disappear when you paste it somewhere else.
Yeah, we can see some special characters using the Show/Hide button on the Home tab of the Ribbon (anyone ever use Corel WordPerfect with its handy Reveal Codes feature?), but we can’t directly manipulate anything other than just deleting the characters. Otherwise, we must manually remove the formatting using the Word interface.
Manually remove text formatting
We briefly review the manual approach through the application interface, but the content below covers a custom macro to quickly remove formatting from the current paragraph.
In Word for Windows or Mac
The Home tab on the Ribbon has a Remove All Formatting button (icon is a little A with an eraser), or we can assign a shortcut to one of the standard Word commands mentioned in a previous article.
Windows only shortcuts
In Windows, Control+Q removes the paragraph formatting and Control+Space removes any manual character formatting from selected text. That was easy. Although, I tend to remap the shortcuts since I like those key combinations for my own macros.
No Mac-only standard shortcuts?
In Word for Mac, there are no standard keyboard shortcuts to remove general formatting, but we can modify formatting with various shortcuts. The Remove All Formatting button mentioned above is present. Also, the internal Word commands still exist, so we could assign them to a custom shortcut if desired.
Clear all formatting command
A previous article mentions a select number of nearly hidden Word formatting removal commands, but let's quickly review two of them.
- ClearAllFormatting command will remove all manual formatting and all character and paragraph styles if the whole (or none of the) paragraph is selected. Any paragraph formatting or styles will be removed, but we need to select the relevant text if we want to remove any character formatting.
- CharacterClearFormatting will remove any character-specific formatting from the selected text, but it will not affect any paragraph formatting or styles.
We previously covered how to manually add shortcuts in Word for Mac, and a separate video shows how to do the same in Word for Windows (clunkier). If you prefer to automate the process, we also cover a lengthy VBA command to assign shortcuts in a macro, but a separate member article series makes the macro-based (re)assignments more convenient. Shortcut organization or reassignments are much easier with the latter approach, but it is more complicated to set up.
Clear character formatting gotcha
When using the CharacterClearAllFormatting command in VBA, the first character of the selection must be formatted text, or the command actually complains and doesn’t do anything to the remaining text in the selection even it includes character formatting.
Even with the manual command CharacterClearFormatting, it works for the whole word if no selection exists but only if the first character has formatting. Is this a deal-breaker? No, but it's a little quirky.
Clear specific formatting
If we want more targeted control, several other commands exit to handle specific formatting removal such as only manual formatting, only styles, only for paragraphs or characters, etc.
Custom remove any formatting macro
While Word provides several tools to manually remove text formatting, sometimes they have a quirky default behavior depending on whether or not a selection exists when the command is run. The standard commands have a decent intuitive behavior, but it would be nice if they worked exactly how we wanted.
It's extra work for only a slight improvement in this case, but we can nevertheless achieve more detailed control with a custom macro. For example, we can automatically select the current paragraph, so the formatting removal works for the entire paragraph even when no text is initially selected.
The intended behavior of our formatting removal macro is:
- If an initial selection exists → Just remove the formatting from the selection as usual
- If no initial selection exists → First select the current paragraph and then remove all text formatting
This modification also saves the step of selecting the current paragraph, but it does sidestep that aspect of the default behavior. We further mention two ways to tweak the macro to your liking.
No formatting removal commands for range variables
We use the Selection in this macro since Range variables do not include these formatting removal commands.
Create the empty macro
A previous article covered creating an empty VBA macro through the application interface, or we can just open the VBA editor with Alt+F11 in Word for Windows or Option+F11 on a Mac and type or paste the plain text into the editor. Either way, the empty macro will look something like:
The single quote on the second line tells VBA the rest of the text on that line is a comment meant for human readers. The empty line patiently awaits our amazing custom formatting removal commands.
Check for an initial selection
Given the intended task, we need to detect whether an initial selection exists. A rough conditional statement might look something like:
We check where there is a selection and select the current paragraph if not. Then we remove the formatting from whatever text is selected after the conditional statement whether the selection was changed or not.
Selection check strangeness (aside)
It may seem a little strange at first to check whether no selection exists rather than just checking the affirmative question (whether it exists), but the paragraph selection step is only run if the Selection is initially an insertion point (i.e., the blinking I-bar). We do nothing if a selection already exists. Thus, it is more convenient to ask the negative question.
As a teaching aside, an alternative structure would take a specific action either way.
This variation is logically more straight forward, but see how the formatting removal is done in either case making it redundant. Why not just pull it out of the conditional statement and let the macro do that step whether the selection is modified or not.
Using the Type of the Selection
We can check whether a selection exists using the Type property of the Selection.
The Selection type is stored as a numeric value, so we just use an equals = sign for comparison.
The Selection Type constant wdSelectionIP is defined in a table of Selection Type constants. This constant checks whether the Selection is an insertion point (i.e., the blinking I-bar waiting for us to type text). If so, then no text (or any content) is selected.
Do not use the "no selection" type
This will sound a little confusing the current context, but do not use the Selection type constant, wdNoSelection. Based on the name, it seems the obvious choice for this check, but it doesn’t work as expected at least based on what “no selection” would mean to a human using Word. Using wdNoSelection refers to some kind of "no active selection" state meaning no insertion point or selection is present in the document. A constant named something like "wdInvalidSelection" would make more sense given the usage.
Fortunately, the wdSelectionIP constant works consistently and intuitively with what we expect as humans when evaluating whether just an insertion point exists in the document.
No selection conditional statement
We include the above condition in the rough conditional statement:
Any steps we need to run when no selection exists can be placed inside the If statement. No additional steps are run if a selection already exists when the macro is run. See our brief introduction to conditional statements in VBA for more explanation.
Select the current paragraph
In this macro, if no initial selection exists, we want to select the current paragraph before continuing. We beginning by referring to Paragraphs collection of the Selection.
Selection collections store the elements that are either fully or partially spanned by the respective collection. We get the current paragraph using the First property of the Paragraphs collection.
A Paragraph is its own data type in VBA (called an "object"), so we need it's document range before we can select it in the macro. We refer to the Range property of the Paragraph.
Finally, we select the current paragraph using the Select property of any Range.
We need to select the intended range, so it becomes the current document Selection. As such, the upcoming formatting removal command will act on this content. We would skip this step if we were using a Range to carry out some other macro task, but the Selection is required for the formatting removal methods.
Select the paragraph conditional statement
We insert this command into the conditional statement above:
If a selection exists already, we assume the user intended to make it and continue without changing anything.
Remove any formatting
The VBA command to remove all formatting from the selection is the ClearFormatting method:
This doesn’t have any issues with character formatting like the ClearCharacterAllFormatting method (available in VBA) which causes an error if no character formatting exists in the selection.
Preserving the original position or selection
The conditional statement may change the Selection by expanding the user's initial position to select the current paragraph. Occasionally, this can be a visual cue that something changed in the document (a little UI perk), but it's often nicer if the initial position or selection does not change when the macro is run.
Normally, we could use Ranges to avoid this side effect while performing the task, but here we don’t have a choice about using the Selection object.
Store the initial position or selection range
We can store the initial position and restore it at the end of the macro. While a few ways exists to do this, a convenient and easy one is to just store the current Selection position using its Range property.
The variable MyInitialRange is implicitly given a Range data type since Selection.Range is a Range, but we need to Set it for the assignment since a Range contains more information than just a plain value. Otherwise, we make the assignment with an equals = sign as usual.
Restore the initial position or selection
At the end of the macro, one might imagine we would just reverse this command to restore the starting position or selection, but the reverse doesn’t work.
VBA doesn’t allow us to manually assign the Selection’s Range property. It's not technically listed as read-only in the documentation, but it's actually easier to just use the Select method to select the stored range anyhow.
If an initial selection existed, this command just reselects the same content, so nothing changes. While this is technically a redundant step in that case, the extra effort required to make the macro perfectly efficient is unnecessary.
The solution works, but after using Range variables, it's a little clunky in comparison. However in this macro, it provides a clear way to preserve the original position, so the user can just keep working uninterrupted. Our hands are tied in this macro since we must use the Selection to access the remove formatting methods.
Final macro
Now, put the above commands and assignments together for our formatting removal macro.
If an initial selection exists, all character formatting in the selection is cleared. If no initial selection exists, all character and paragraph formatting from the current paragraph is cleared without needing to select it. The paragraph reverts to the default style which is usually the Normal style.
I assigned my version of this macro to Command+Control+Option+F10 in Word for Mac and Control+Alt+Shift+F10 in Windows.
The extra description comment at the top mentions why the Selection was used. Unless the macro is super short, using the Selection is generally a less-than-optimal choice compared to using a Range variable. It's an easy detail to forget, so mentioning such details will remind us why we made that choice if we ever need to return to the macro. If so, it's annoying to spend several minutes wondering why the macro is designed the way it is when we had a clear reason at the time.
Improvements
Can we do anything better? We mention two tweak to spark ideas and illustrate how we can use macros to make Word work our way.
Disable screen updates
Since we're forced to work with the Selection for this macro, it is an excellent candidate for disabling screen updates while running.
Only character formatting tweak
While the macro is extra work, we can tweak it precisely to our preferences. For example, we could remove only the character formatting and leave the paragraph formatting intact. Only that line would change to the ClearCharacterAllFormatting method:
However, each version needs to be tested since they can have their own quirks (see gotcha above for the latter method).
Sloppy paragraph selection tweak
One tweak I'll implement for some macros is to automatically span the entirety of any partially selected paragraphs before continuing with the rest of the macro. It's a simple extension of the way the above macro works, and it makes selections faster since we don't need to be as precise with the mouse or keyboard.
I call these "sloppy selections." Of course, the macro must either work with the given selection (assuming it was intended) or modify it (assuming the macro allows a sloppy selection) since it's difficult to do both at the same time, so pick the one you prefer for your workflow.
Without a lot of explanation, we can replace the entire conditional statement in the above macro with just one command. The easiest way to allow sloppy selections is the Expand method.
This simple command will extend the selection forward and backward over the full paragraphs before removing the formatting with the caveat that it always modifies the selection to span one or more full paragraphs.
