I demonstrated today's tip in Microsoft Word, but it also works in all the Microsoft Office programs (Excel, Access, Publisher, Outlook, etc), WordPerfect, OpenOffice and others.

The tip is simple in its performance and gargantuan in its function. Format Painter copies formatting from one location and applies it to another. In the video example below, I formatted one line of text to have a particular look and it took 31 clicks of the mouse. Using Format Painter, I copied the look of that text to some plain text in just three steps. This technique comes in handy when formatting longer documents, spreadsheets, newsletters, etc and can save you a boat-load of time. Here's how to do it:

1. Highlight the text that has already been formatted to your liking using your mouse.
2. Click the Format Painter button.
3. Highlight the text you want to apply the formatting too.

That's it!

Tip Within a Tip:

If you DOUBLE-CLICK the Format Painter button, you can apply the formatting changes to different parts of your document over and over until you unclick the Format Painter button.

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1. When Should You Use the RIGHT Mouse Button?
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3. Drag and Drop
4. Become an (Word) Artist
5. Create a Watermark in Microsoft Word

Tags: format, Mac, Microsoft, Office, openoffice, Word, word processing

This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Application Tips. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.