Clear formatting

When text has accumulated bold, italic, color, font changes, or other styles you no longer want, you can strip them all in one step rather than toggling each one off individually.

What gets removed

Clearing formatting removes three kinds of style at once:

• Inline marks: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, inline code, superscript, subscript, font size, all caps, small caps, text color, and highlight.
• Block styles: titles, subtitles, headings, blockquotes, code blocks, and lists. These are converted to normal paragraphs.
• Paragraph formatting: alignment, line spacing, the space before and after a paragraph, and indents. The paragraphs take the document's own.

Links and comments stay. To remove a link as well, select it and click the Remove link button.

Clear formatting with the toolbar button

1. Select the text you want to clean up. You can select across multiple paragraphs.
2. Click the Clear formatting button at the right end of the formatting toolbar.

The selection becomes plain text in the default font and size, with no heading style.

Clear formatting from the Format menu

The Format menu works on any screen, also when the toolbar doesn't show the Clear formatting button.

1. Select the text you want to clean up.
2. Click the Format menu in the toolbar.
3. Click Clear formatting at the bottom of the menu.

Clear formatting from the keyboard

Press Cmd+\ (Mac) or Ctrl+\ (Windows and Linux). It works in the body, and in a header or footer you are editing.

What is not removed

Clearing formatting acts only on selected text. Text outside the selection is not changed. Tables and images within the selection stay in place; the command removes styles from the text around them, not the elements themselves.

If you want to undo a clear-formatting action, press Cmd+Z (macOS) or Ctrl+Z (Windows).