Word to the wise: The fast and fabulous Format Painter

Today, we have a guest blogger. Elyssa is an editor and project manager at Brainstorm, a leading provider of online and onsite software training and one of our partners that provides customized content for your Productivity Hub.

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Today's tip deals with one of the coolest tools in the Microsoft Office 2007 suite: the Format Painter. Have you ever wished you could get one part of a document to look like another part without having to change all the fonts, colors, type sizes, and styles one by one?

For example, if you need to paste text into a basic flyer promoting a company event, wouldn't it be nice to just push a button that makes the added information look the same as the existing stuff? With Format Painter, it's ridiculously easy.

Here's how it works in Microsoft Word 2007:

1. Select the text that has attributes you want to copy and apply somewhere else.

2. Under the Home tab of the Ribbon, locate the paintbrush icon on the Clipboard group.

3. Clicking the paintbrush will change your mouse pointer to a paintbrush and an I-beam. This shows that the Format Painter feature is on. (You can also press Control Shift C to activate it.)

4. Click and drag through the text you want to apply the new formatting to. If you are changing only one word, you can simply click the word.

5. If you need to use the Format Painter in more than one location in the document, double-click the paintbrush to keep Format Painter active until you turn it off. To deactivate, press Esc or click the paintbrush icon again to turn it off.

Format Painter can save you minutes if not hours a day changing everything from memos to flyers and sales and business proposals. Watch a free, short training video on this topic by BrainStorm.

Elyssa