Copying Paragraph Formatting

You can spend a lot of time formatting paragraphs in Word. This can be inconvenient, particularly if you have several paragraphs spread throughout your document that you need to format the same way. One way to handle the situation is to use styles, but some people would rather not use styles (for whatever reason). Rather than making you redo all your formatting for each paragraph, you can follow these steps to copy paragraph formatting.

1. Select (highlight) the paragraph mark in the paragraph that is completely formatted. This step, of course, assumes that you have Word configured so that paragraph marks are visible; they are difficult to select if you cannot see them.
2. Press Ctrl+C. This copies the paragraph mark to the Clipboard.
3. Select (highlight) the paragraph mark in the paragraph that you want to format.
4. Press Ctrl+V. This copies the contents of the Clipboard (the paragraph mark) to your document, replacing the old paragraph mark.

This tip works because all the formatting properties of a paragraph are maintained in the paragraph mark. When you copy the paragraph mark, you copy all the formatting that belonged to that paragraph.