MS Word's Clear Formatting

MS Word's Clear Formatting

A more gentle approach is the “Clear Formatting” feature of MS Word.

Clear Formatting will also clear out MS Word bloat, along with italics and bold, and other formatting you may want.

It will not, as "Saving to Notepad" does, clear page and section breaks, and it won’t remove your images.

Clean up an MS Word 2003 doc file With Clear Formatting.

From the Menu at the top of the screen, choose Format|Styles & Formatting

Menu|Format|Styles & Formatting|Clear Formatting

Select Styles and Formatting from the Format drop down menu, as shown in the above screen shot.

The Styles and Formatting box will open on the right side of the screen.  The way I have mine set, it takes up almost half my screen; yours may look different, depending on your own settings.

Notice the first item is Clear Formatting.

That selection will clear the formatting from anything you have selected in  your text.  You could clear just one word if you wanted to, but we are going to select and clear the entire file.

Do CTRL-A, to select  your entire file:

With your entire file “selected”, and highlighted, press Clear Formatting at the top of the Styles and Formatting box at the right of your screen.

Formatting and hidden codes are gone.

Poof! The formatting (along with most of the “bloat”) is gone!

Well… most of the formatting is gone. As you can see, the photos are still in place, so you know some code is still holding them in place.

Paragraph breaks are also still in place. That will make it easier to put things back together.

If I had a file like this with a large number of photos, I might be tempted to try to leave this code in place and test my file by creating a Sample:

How to Create and Download a Sample of Your Kindle Format eBook

To see if it will work this way so I don’t have to go through the steps of  putting all the photos back in.