Notion Text Formatting Shortcuts

Ctrl+B (Cmd+B on Mac) bolds the current text selection, following the same universal convention shared by virtually every text editor on any platform, requiring no adjustment for anyone coming from Word, Google Docs, or any other app covered on this site. Ctrl+I italicizes the selection the same way, and Ctrl+Shift+S applies strikethrough, drawing a line through the selected text — commonly used inside a to-do item's label to visibly mark something as abandoned or no longer relevant without actually deleting the text, preserving the record of what was originally planned. Inline code (Ctrl+E) wraps the selection in a monospace, code-styled span, visually distinct from a full code block, which is a separate block type entirely with its own syntax highlighting and language selector. Inline code is the right choice for a short reference within a sentence — a filename, a variable name, a single command — while a proper code block is meant for multi-line code that benefits from language-aware syntax highlighting. Highlighting (Ctrl+Shift+H) applies a background color to the selected text rather than changing the text color itself, and in some Notion versions repeated presses cycle through the available highlight color options rather than simply toggling highlighting on and off — worth testing once on your specific version, since the exact cycling behavior has shifted slightly across updates. Clearing formatting removes inline character-level styling (bold, italic, code, highlight color) from a selection while leaving the block's underlying type completely untouched — a heading block stripped of inline formatting is still a heading, just without any bold or colored spans within its text, since the block type itself and its inline formatting are two entirely separate layers in Notion's model, unlike some simpler editors where formatting and structure are more tightly coupled. A useful distinction worth internalizing across every formatting shortcut in this category: all of them operate on inline, character-level styling applied within whatever block currently holds your text selection, not on the block's fundamental type. Converting a paragraph into a heading (covered on the block-editing page) is a structural transformation of the block itself, while bolding a word inside that same heading is a separate, independent inline styling action layered on top of it — you can freely combine both without one affecting the other, since Notion tracks block type and inline formatting as two genuinely separate properties of the same piece of content. One detail that surprises people moving from Word or Google Docs: none of these inline formatting options are exposed as ribbon buttons the way they are in a traditional word processor. Selecting text and applying bold via keyboard shows the change instantly, and the same floating toolbar that appears above a text selection offers mouse-driven equivalents for every shortcut here, plus the color pickers for highlight and text color that have no dedicated keyboard shortcut of their own at all — the keyboard shortcuts cover the handful of formatting options common enough to deserve a dedicated key, while anything requiring a choice from a longer list of options (which specific highlight color, which specific text color) necessarily routes through that floating toolbar's menu instead, since a single keystroke can't express a choice among a dozen colors. Inline formatting also survives conversion between compatible block types in ways worth knowing about. If a bolded phrase sits inside a paragraph and you later convert that paragraph into a bulleted list item or a heading via the typed Markdown shortcuts, the bold formatting on that phrase carries over intact, since the conversion changes only the block's structural type, not its inline character formatting — the two are tracked entirely independently, as covered above. This means you can freely build out a page's structure first and layer in bold, italic, and highlight formatting afterward, or do it the other way around and format text before ever deciding on its final block type, without either order causing you to lose formatting work already done. A final practical note on combining these shortcuts: applying more than one inline format to the same selection (bold plus italic plus a highlight color, for instance) is fully supported and doesn't require any special sequencing — select the text once, then apply each shortcut in any order, and Notion layers them together visually rather than the most recent one overriding the others. This differs from block-level properties, where a block can only ever be one type at a time (a paragraph can't simultaneously also be a heading), which is the core distinction between block-level structure and inline character-level formatting that recurs throughout this whole category.