You copy and paste something into Microsoft Word and suddenly the formatting in half of your text is ruined. This years-old headache is now being solved in Word. — Photo: Uwe Anspach/dpa
BERLIN: You copy and paste some text from another program into Microsoft Word, and suddenly the colour, font, size and other formattings of your text are all wrong. Whole minutes are wasted fixing it!
Now, thanks to a new feature delivered by Microsoft at last, this decade-old headache should be a thing of the past as the program switches to a new default setting - "Merge Formatting."
That means that any meaningful formatting from the original content (for example bold or underlined text, and list and table structure) will be kept, but it will also match the formatting of the destination content in terms of font type, size and colour.
In contrast, the previous default of “Keep Source Formatting” kept all the original formatting and layout properties of the source content.
Announcing the change in May, Microsoft admitted that its previous approach, used for over a decade, led to users wasting "countless minutes manually fixing all the formatting of the pasted content."
The new feature is available to Word for Windows users running Version 2405 (Build 17624.20000) or later. However, it’s not available in Word for the web or Word for Mac. – dpa
