How to Clear Formatting in Word (Ctrl+Spacebar)

Ctrl+Spacebar (Cmd+Spacebar on Mac, where it's frequently overridden by Spotlight) strips direct character-level formatting — bold, italic, font, size, color, highlighting — off the selected text, dropping it back to the defaults baked into its underlying paragraph style. It does not remove the paragraph style itself, only formatting applied on top of it. **The most common use case**: pasting text copied from a webpage, PDF, or email, which almost always arrives carrying its own font, size, and color from the source — visually inconsistent with the rest of your document. Selecting the freshly pasted text and pressing Ctrl+Spacebar strips that foreign formatting in one keystroke, leaving plain text that inherits your document's actual style definitions instead. **What it doesn't fix**: if the pasted content brought its own paragraph-level formatting (like unusual line spacing or indentation, or even an unwanted heading style), Ctrl+Spacebar alone won't reset that, since paragraph-level properties are separate from character-level direct formatting. Applying the Normal style (Ctrl+Shift+N) afterward resets paragraph-level formatting too. **Better paste options to avoid the problem entirely**: rather than fixing formatting after the fact, Ctrl+Shift+V (Cmd+Option+Shift+V on Mac in many versions, though the exact Mac binding varies) pastes as plain text directly, skipping the cleanup step. The Paste Options button that appears after any paste also offers 'Keep Text Only' as a one-click choice if you forget to use the shortcut. **The Mac gotcha**: macOS frequently reserves Cmd+Spacebar at the system level for Spotlight search or switching input sources, which intercepts the keystroke before Word ever processes it — so on many Mac setups, the shortcut appears to simply do nothing. Reassigning or disabling that system shortcut under System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts fixes it, or you can use the Clear Formatting eraser icon on the Home ribbon instead. **Related shortcuts**: Ctrl+Shift+N applies the Normal style to reset paragraph-level formatting alongside character formatting, and Ctrl+Shift+V (or the equivalent plain-text paste) prevents the problem from happening in the first place rather than fixing it after. **Clear Formatting and character styles**: if a character style (distinct from a paragraph style) has been applied on top of direct formatting, Ctrl+Spacebar clears just the direct formatting overrides while leaving the character style itself intact, following the same layered logic as paragraph styles and their own local overrides. **A quick test to confirm it worked**: after clearing formatting, the text should visually match the surrounding document's default appearance for that paragraph style — if it still looks different, the remaining inconsistency is likely a paragraph-level rather than character-level formatting issue, which Ctrl+Shift+N (applying Normal style) addresses instead. **Clearing formatting on an entire document at once**: selecting the whole document with Ctrl+A before pressing Ctrl+Spacebar strips direct formatting everywhere at once, a more aggressive cleanup useful when an entire document has accumulated inconsistent manual formatting over many edits and needs a full reset back to its underlying styles before further work. **Mistake to avoid**: using Clear Formatting as a substitute for actually fixing a badly-structured document — if a document's problem is that no heading styles were ever applied and everything is just bold, larger-sized body text pretending to be headings, clearing formatting removes the bold and size override but doesn't retroactively apply the correct Heading style, leaving plain unstyled text where a heading should be; the real fix is applying the appropriate paragraph style, not just stripping the manual formatting that was covering for its absence. **Clear formatting inside a table**: selecting text inside a table cell and applying Ctrl+Spacebar clears character formatting within that cell's content but has no effect on the table's own borders, shading, or cell structure, since those are table-level properties entirely separate from the character formatting this shortcut targets. **Working with Track Changes active**: if Track Changes is enabled, clearing formatting is recorded as a tracked formatting change exactly like any other edit, visible to reviewers as a formatting-change marker rather than silently altering the document — worth being aware of in a collaborative review workflow where an unexpected wave of tracked formatting changes might otherwise look confusing to a reviewer who wasn't expecting a cleanup pass.