Format Painter in Microsoft Office

Miscellaneous

The Format Painter is a very cool tool. It'll copy the format from one "thing" to another. It's located right up on your standard toolbar in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, FrontPage, and Access.

The picture below shows the location of Word's Format Painter if you've followed our Recommended Menu Settings article for Word's toolbars.

You have a perfectly formatted paragraph, and you can't seem to get another one to be formatted the same way. To use the Format Painter:

  1. Select the perfectly formatted paragraph.
  2. Click on the Format Painter toolbar button.
  3. Click anywhere in the middle of the next area of text that you want formatted perfectly.

You can turn the Format Painter on and leave it on until you turn it off.

  • Double-click the Format Painter button to turn it on.
  • Single-click to turn it off.