Google Docs: Fix Your Messy Formatting Quickly

If you’ve ever copied and pasted content from a webpage, PDF or other source into your Google Doc, you’ve probably had the experience of carrying over unwanted formatting. Suddenly your doc has a mess of colors, spacing, fonts and more. The best way to prevent this is of course, to clear the formatting before you paste it, but that’s easy to forget.

Here’s the good news: you don’t have to go through multiple processes to normalize the new text. You can fix MOST of the formatting problems caused by copy/paste with one of the two buttons on the menu bar:

Clear Formatting Button (right-hand side of menu bar OR first select … to see more tools)

This magical button will remove almost all of the formatting you have accidentally carried into your document. Simply select all the badly formatted text and hit the button. This will clear most of the formatting and replace it with your document default formatting.

If you are trying to clear formatting at the paragraph level, be sure to select the entire paragraph, not just words within a paragraph.

Paint Format Button (left-hand side of menu bar)

This button requires more steps, but does even more than the Clear Formatting button – rather than just clearing the formatting, it allows you to copy or “paint” formatting from elsewhere in the document.

• Select any text that has the formatting you want to copy
• Hit the Paint Format button
• Select the text you want to format

If you are trying to mimic formatting at the paragraph level, be sure to select the entire paragraph, not just words within a paragraph.

What might these buttons miss?

As indicated, using these buttons will fix MOST of your badly formatted text, but you may need to use a couple more tools to eliminate some more stubborn formatting.

Style: You may need to fix the Style. The default is “Normal Text.” If the Style isn’t correct, select your text and change to the right style.

Weblink or Email Address: If you pasted text with an embedded URL or email address, you may need to clear it. Select the text without clicking on it, and the link information will pop up. Hit the icon on the right with the line through it. This will remove the link.

Line Spacing: One of the most aggravating elements you can accidentally bring into your document is odd spacing. You may need to fix this via the Line Spacing tool. The button is located between the justification buttons and the numbered list button:

Select the imported text and click the Line Spacing button to call up a menu. Select the option that conforms to the spacing in your document.

Notice how in the above image of the drop down from the Line Spacing, you have the option of removing spacing both before and after the paragraph (if there were no extra spacing, the drop down would instead indicate “Add” not “Remove”).

Even if the Clear Formatting or Paint Format buttons do not fix all of your formatting woes, they should fix most of them, and it’s worth using one or the other as a starting place.