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DEMO: Format Painter

Format Painter is a productivity tool available across Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Google Docs that copies text and paragraph formatting and applies it to other content in seconds. Mastering it eliminates the need to manually reformat text one element at a time.

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About this video

Format Painter is a formatting utility built into the core Microsoft Office applications, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as Google Docs. Its primary function is to capture the formatting properties of a selected piece of text or cell and apply those exact properties to other content, eliminating the need to manually recreate the same styling across a document. In Microsoft Word, this includes both character-level formatting such as bold, italic, and font size, as well as paragraph-level formatting such as list styles, making it important to apply the tool precisely to avoid unintended style changes. The tool operates in two modes. A single click on the Format Painter button copies the formatting and allows it to be applied once before the tool deactivates automatically. A double-click keeps the tool active indefinitely, allowing the same formatting to be applied across multiple selections in sequence until the user manually turns it off. This makes it especially efficient when standardizing the appearance of large volumes of text or data. Format Painter is not limited to Word. In Excel, it can transfer cell formatting such as currency styles and number formats across individual cells or ranges. In PowerPoint, it works the same way on text within slides. Google Docs also includes equivalent functionality, making Format Painter a broadly applicable skill across the most widely used productivity platforms in professional environments.

What you'll learn

What's covered

Format Painter Tool

Aligned to

CompTIA Tech+
3.3 Explain the purpose and proper use of software.

Key terms

Format Painter
A tool available in Microsoft Office applications and Google Docs that copies formatting from selected text or content and applies it to other text or cells.
Text Formatting
Visual styling applied to text, such as bold, italic, or font size, that controls how text appears in a document.
Paragraph Formatting
Formatting applied at the paragraph level, such as bullet lists or indentation, that affects the structure and layout of a paragraph.

Topics

Format Painter Microsoft Office Google Docs Text Formatting Productivity Tools Microsoft Word

Transcript

The format painter is one of my favorite tools, and one of the least well-known tools.

Copying formatting in Word

This is the format painter right here, and it is a great tool. I'm in Microsoft Word right now, and I've got a bulleted list and I have the word "bold" in here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make that bold word bold, so I'm going to hit B to make it bold so it stands out a little bit more.

Now, one thing I could do is I could go line by line with this and make them all bold, but this takes a while to do. The other option I have is I could copy this format. And to copy it, all I need to do is either select the word or select somewhere inside the word. So let's select the word here. And I can click this format painter, and now I can click this word right here, and it will change that to be bold as well. So it copied that format down there.

Now I can do the same thing here. I'm just going to have anywhere inside of this word, where the formatting is at, selected. I'm going to hit the format painter and I'm going to select this word "bold" right here, and notice that it turns bold. It also changed it to be a bulleted list, because it copied the paragraph style as well. Maybe I didn't want that, so maybe I'm going to turn that part off.

So now I have this italicized, but I'm going to make all of the italicized the same. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to highlight this, I'm going to make it italicized. But it doesn't have to just be italicized — maybe I want to make it a little bit bigger, so I make it a little bit bigger. Maybe I'm going to change the font too, so whatever font it is that I want to turn this into.

And instead of just doing one, where I click this once and then highlight all of them, I'm going to double-click this format painter. And now every time I select it, it's going to keep it selected, and I can go down and change all of them. So it's just a real fast way to change a lot of formatting on a lot of different text all at once. Once I'm done using it, to turn it off I just click it again and then it will turn off.

It's not just Word

It's not just Word — this works in Excel as well. For instance, let's say this is a dollar amount and I want to apply the dollar amount to this in English. What I can do is I can then copy this and apply it to another cell as well, or do the double click and select the ones that I want, or a range. So it can really easily be applied: copy that format and apply it to these other cells. And now I can turn that off.

And guess what? It's in PowerPoint as well. So here we've got something that's bold, so I can make that bold, and we'll just select that and do a format painter to change everything else that I want bolded as well. So you can see that it applies to a lot of scenarios in a lot of applications.

And it's not just a Microsoft feature. So if I go into Google Docs, I can do the same thing. I can make this bold, copy the format, and apply it across the board.

This is an awesome tool that can really speed things up.

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