Today I put together a newsletter in Word. I combined six documents that I received from other people and formatted them consistently into the newsletter. The process made me think about how Word users often are completely mystified when Word seems to change the formatting of text pasted in from other places.
The thing that most people don’t realize is that in Word, there are two distinct ways to format text: using styles or using "local formatting." Local formatting is text changes you’ve applied to a paragraph using the commands in the Format menu or toolbar buttons. You format a paragraph with a style when you select a name from the Style toolbar button.
People always say, "oh I don’t use styles." The reality is that yes, you do. Whether you realize it or not, every single paragraph in every single document has a style. That style is called Normal. You may have added 25 font changes to every paragraph in the document, but to Word, underneath, all that text is still using that Normal style.
So when you copy text in from another document, Word is looking at the style. Suppose you copy in a passage of text from a document that has its Normal style set to Arial 10 point. You copy that text into your document where the Normal style is formatted as Times New Roman. When you paste your text, it takes on the formatting of Normal style in the receiving document. If the Normal style is Times New Roman, that’s how your text appears.
Okay, so that’s what happens if there is no local formatting. However, when text is copied from one document to another, it retains local formatting. So if you made one piece of text blue in the middle of a paragraph by choosing Format|Font, that text will still be blue when you copy it. The text around it will change to the formatting of the Normal style in the receiving document.
Understanding what’s going on can work to your advantage. For example, in my newsletter, none of the 6 documents I combined had any special styles or local formatting defined. So I was able to choose Insert|File and add the files into the newsletter. The files took on the formatting of the Normal style I had defined in the newsletter automatically. I didn’t have to change any formatting at all.
Another way to avoid formatting problems is to dump formatting completely and start over. In that case, you can copy text and then in the receiving document, choose Edit|Paste Special. Then choose the Unformatted text option and you’ll get only the text with no local formatting at all.