Removing text formatting in Microsoft Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint

It’s not uncommon to copy text from some source into an email, and you find that it’s copied over all the formatting that was part of the source material. You can try various techniques to remove the formatting before you paste it, but you can also remove the formatting once it’s in your email, Word document, or PowerPoint slide. Here’s how to make that happen…

Here’s an example of some text I copied into an email in the Outlook client. For the sake of this tip, let’s assume I really didn’t want the text to be formatted:

To remove the formatting, I highlight the affected text and click the Clear All Formatting button in the Messaging ribbon bar

:

All the formatting is now removed, and I can now do whatever I need to do without trying to fix all the formatting first:

The same thing works in Outlook for the Web also:

The formatting is now set to the default of a blank email:

Also, this works in Word:

And in PowerPoint: