Can't find a quick way to override all formatting when applying a paragraph style

[sfriedberg]

Since this thread has been reopened, I'd like to add two more ways to get part of the desired functionality.  In the Text menu, Reapply Text Styles and Reapply Base Styles will affect selected text.  (I have not systematically tested with simply planting the cursor in a paragraph.)  However, I can never remember what the effect of each action is, because the menu names aren't super distinctive.  Reapply Text Styles removes all local formatting, leaving both paragraph and character styles.  Reapply Base Styles removes all local formatting and character styles, leaving paragraph styles.

So Text > Reapply Base Styles seems to address one of the original desires to remove all formatting except the paragraph style.

[Old Bruce]

17 minutes ago, Peter M Dodge said:

However, when I attempted to do that I was finding a lot of things that still do have formatting in spite of my attempt to clear it all.  These individual overrides were retained.

Then try using Edit > Paste Without Format might clear those up.

For the nuclear option I am a fan of pasting the pre-formatted text into a text editor which will convert it all to plain text. Then I can either save that as a plain text document or select all the (now) plain text and copy it to the clipboard again.

[Peter M Dodge]

5 hours ago, sfriedberg said:

Since this thread has been reopened, I'd like to add two more ways to get part of the desired functionality.  In the Text menu, Reapply Text Styles and Reapply Base Styles will affect selected text.  (I have not systematically tested with simply planting the cursor in a paragraph.)  However, I can never remember what the effect of each action is, because the menu names aren't super distinctive.  Reapply Text Styles removes all local formatting, leaving both paragraph and character styles.  Reapply Base Styles removes all local formatting and character styles, leaving paragraph styles.

So Text > Reapply Base Styles seems to address one of the original desires to remove all formatting except the paragraph style.

Yes, that seems to be the function that does what I was looking for, though I never would have guessed that from the names.  I'd agree the names of these functions could be clearer.

5 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Then try using Edit > Paste Without Format might clear those up.

For the nuclear option I am a fan of pasting the pre-formatted text into a text editor which will convert it all to plain text. Then I can either save that as a plain text document or select all the (now) plain text and copy it to the clipboard again.

Yeah, if I had to do this over again, that's definitely the route I will take.  In attempting to make sure this wasn't just an Affinity quirk, I took the text into Corel WordPerfect, Adobe InDesign, and OpenOffice, and all of them had very different style interpretation problems.  So Word has definitely done something very weird with the formatting.  I suspect what has happened is whenever something was copied and pasted within word, "segments" were created in the document which it sectioned off the formatting in.  I don't really have a way to test that hypothesis however.

[PeeGeeBee]

I'm still new to Publisher (on a Mac) and looking for a way to apply Paragraph Style while simultaneously preserving character formatting, using shortcuts. I've managed to get the shortcut working perfectly, but there seems to be no option to have it preserve the existing character style. Anyone know how to do this? Many thanks

[walt.farrell]

27 minutes ago, PeeGeeBee said:

I'm still new to Publisher (on a Mac) and looking for a way to apply Paragraph Style while simultaneously preserving character formatting, using shortcuts. I've managed to get the shortcut working perfectly, but there seems to be no option to have it preserve the existing character style. Anyone know how to do this? Many thanks

The only way I know to do that is via the Text Style panel's right-click menu, and there are no keyboard shortcuts for that.