Formatting a long business report in Microsoft Word 2016

Hi, in this video we're going to look at formatting a really long document, and we're going to start by bringing in all the text, and playing around with things like, what to do with the existing formatting, and your current formatting, and how do I strip it out, those types of things. So let's go and do that now in this video.

First up, I'm going to open up Word, and then we're going to bring in our copy. We're going to start a 'New' document,  and we're going to go to 'Layout'. We'll just make sure that the page size is correct. We're using 'US Letter'. I'm going to bring in some text, now I've got some text, and you can download the files to play along with this tutorial. There'll be a link on this page here somewhere. I'm going to 'File', 'Open', and if you haven't already, download the exercise files that's on our 'Desktop', there's one called 'Word Exercise Files', and this one here called '03 Long Document'. I want to open up 'Long Text'. This is the document that's been sent to me by a client, or maybe by my colleague, so what I want to do is select all the text now and move it into the other document.

So, to select it all, I can click and drag, and you can drag forever. It's a really long document, so a nice easier way to do it is, with your cursor anywhere in this document, go 'Control A' on your keyboard, and let's click 'Copy'. Let's 'Close' this one down, and this is the document that I want to bring it into.

So to bring in text there's a couple of different ways, and if I just-- on the top, under 'Home', and I click 'Paste', what it does is, by default, it brings through the text, it brings through all the formatting from the other document. You can see at the top here, it's up there, the title and heading as well. So it's up to you whether you want this to happen. Say it's perfect and you like it, 'Control V', or hitting this 'Paste' button here, it’s perfect, but let's say you don't want any of that formatting, so let's look at some other option. So I'm going to 'undo', I'll use this little kind of backwards arrow here for undoing. 

What I'd like to do is, under 'Paste' there's a couple of-- see this little arrow here? There's a couple of different options. The first one is, what we just did by default by clicking the 'Paste' button. Now there's these other two. 'Merge Formatting' is a bit weird, we're going to skip him for a second. Let's look at this last one, 'Keep Text Only'. 'Keep Text Only', you can see, just brings through the raw text. What it hasn't done is, you can see, it's not used titles, it's not used heading, so it's just pure text. Often I like this way, I like just kind of cleaning all off, and just working this way. Some of the trouble though is that it's-- the kind of name gives it away, it says 'Keep Text Only'. So it strips out any images that you might have, so if you've got other parts of the Word document that you want to bring through, just know that 'Keep Text Only' is going to rip it off, and you're going to have to copy and paste those through separately, which is a bit of a pain.

One of the other options in there-- I'm going to 'undo' it again before it's all gone. One of the other options, under 'Paste' there's this 'Merge Formatting'. Looks like it does exactly the same thing as 'Keep Text Only'. What it's used for is, let's say-- it's wherever your cursor is, and the style applying to that, so let's say I've got a title here, I got a sub heading, and I've used this 'Heading 2' for it, and now I've got this kind of numbered list going on. That's when this other one comes into play, and say I've had my cursor here in the title, and I go to this option that says 'Merge Formatting', can you see, its put it through as-- if I click on it, it's brought through all my text as that title, because that's where my cursor was. If I 'undo' and if I have my cursor in the subheading style, and I go 'Paste', and I go to 'Merge', you can see the whole thing is a giant sub head. So when you’d use this is when you're maybe not copying the whole document across, it's when you're copying little pieces across. It's really handy, say if you've got a nice big table and it's got all sorts of different formatting, and you're slowly moving things across, you can copy and paste into this cell, and if you use the 'Merge Formatting', it will match wherever it's going. So that could be handy.

If you want to the last thing-- in this case is how I want to do, I want to actually bring through all the headings, but I don't want it to be that ugly stencil font in the purple and the blue, so I want it to come across, but I don't-- and I want it to remain titles and headings, but I want to use a style that exists in this document, so I want to strip out all the formatting, and match the formatting that I've got in the document. And we'll do this by creating something called a style set, and we'll cover that in the next video, so let's go and do that now.