Plus, it will match the pasted content with whatever font you’d used in the surrounding text, so if you had switched from Arial to Comic Sans (yuck), for example, your pasted-in text would match that style. When you use “Paste without formatting,” Docs will strip out all of the links and images and so on, as I mentioned. Now, there are a couple of differences to consider here. Just select a portion, or all, of your existing document, and use either the menu option or keyboard shortcut.Īll of the formatting of your selected text will be immediately removed, and you’ll be left with text that matches the default Google Docs text.

You can also use the Clear formatting shortcut, which is Command-Backslash.

The solution here is to use the Clear formatting option, located in the Format > Clear formatting menu item or its shortcut. How to Clear All Formatting in Google Docs But what if you already have an existing document full of text, and you want to remove all of the inconsistent formatting? The Paste without formatting command is fine when you’re pasting new text into your document. (In Chrome on the Mac, that shortcut is listed instead as Command-Shift-V, but Option-Command-Shift-V will work too if you like the ease of only having to remember one shortcut.) Note that this menu item doesn’t appear in all browsers “Paste without formatting” is missing in Docs within Safari, for example, but its shortcut, Option-Shift-Command-V, still works and does the same thing. This takes the text that’s in your clipboard and pastes only the plain text without any formatting. One solution to this is to use the Paste without formatting option, found in the Edit menu in Google Docs, or by using the keyboard shortcut Command-Shift-V (or Control-Shift-V for other operating systems).

In most cases, however, you probably want to avoid this and keep things uniform. There may be some cases where you want to preserve the original source formatting, and you don’t care about having inconsistent fonts, sizes, and styles in your document. This means that the pasted text won’t match your document’s default font formatting, nor will it match the formatting of other pasted text blocks if they’re from different sources. Now, in many cases, the text you pasted will have its original source formatting. For the copy and paste actions, you can use either keyboard shortcuts (Command-C to copy and Command-V to paste in macOS). This can be from Apple Mail, a webpage, or pretty much any application. To get started, open or create a new document in Google Docs and paste in some text from an outside source.

Google docs copy formatting shortcut