Thursday, November 15, 2007

Copy Your Formatting

Ever wonder what the Format Painter button in Microsoft Office program does?


The Format Painter

The Format Painter in the Microsoft Office suite is a handy command that lets you copy and apply the formatting of an object, either text or image, to another object. This allows you to make two or more objects look somewhat uniform.

Some of the styles the Format Painter copies are:
  • The font style, font size, and font variation (underline, bold, italic)
  • The object alignment (either left-, right-, center-aligned, or justified)
  • Margins, paragraph indents
  • Other applicable formatting, like shadow settings, 3D settings, etc.

So, it's really useful if you want to achieve consistency in your document. The good thing is, you don't have perform all the formatting stuff on an object, you can just copy it. For example, you applied bold with shadow complete with font selection to a block of text, and you want to apply that style to another block of text, instead of performing all the effects to the new block all over again, just use the Copy Formatting button.

To use the Copy Formatting feature:

  1. Select the object (text or picture) to copy its formatting
  2. Click the Copy Formatting button on the Standard toolbar in Office 2003 and below, or in the Home tab in Office 2007
  3. Select the object where you'll apply the copied formatting. Office will apply all applicable formatting to the object.

Tip: Double-clicking the Copy Formatting button allows you to apply the copied formatting to multiple objects.

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