One click to plain text — styles, HTML tags, Markdown, emojis, hidden characters, and extra spaces all stripped. Free, private, runs in your browser.
The fastest way to remove formatting from text is not in Word at all — it's a browser tool. When you remove text formatting online with this page, everything runs locally: the text you paste never leaves your device, and there is nothing to install, no ribbon to hunt through, no sign-up.
Paste the formatted text into the box above — from a website, a Word document, an email, or an AI chat.
Click Remove formatting. The detection badges show what was found: HTML tags, Markdown symbols, hidden characters, extra spaces.
Copy the clean plain text and paste it wherever it's going — it lands as plain text everywhere.
That's the whole job: Markdown symbols, HTML tags, emojis, hidden characters, and extra spaces stripped in one pass. People remove formatting online when text moves between apps — website to email, AI chat to document, spreadsheet to CMS — because the output pastes clean everywhere and no style travels with the clipboard.
Here is how to remove formatting in Word with the ribbon: select the text, open the Home tab, and click the Clear All Formatting icon — the A with a pink eraser — in the Font group. That resets the selection to the default style: font, size, color, bold, italic, and highlight cleared at once, headings included.
When you remove formatting in Word this way, the words stay and only the styling goes. On Windows there is also a shortcut: select the text and press Ctrl + Space to strip character-level formatting. Word for Mac ships no default one-key equivalent — use the eraser on the Home tab, or add your own via Tools → Customize Keyboard.
For a full-document reset — that's how to remove all formatting in Word — press Ctrl + A, then the eraser icon: two moves, handy before applying your own template styles. And if the formatting arrived from a paste, next time paste as plain text and skip the cleanup entirely.
Excel remove table formatting in one move: click anywhere in the table, open the Table Design tab, and choose Convert to Range — the table becomes plain cells and the banded style goes with it. If you want the table kept but the style gone, Table Design → Table Styles → the first plain style does that instead.
To remove formatting Excel users go to Home → Clear → Clear Formats — that strips cell-level styling like colors, fonts, and number formats without touching values. That is also how you have Excel remove all formatting from a whole sheet: Ctrl + A first, then Clear Formats. Clear All would delete the content too, so don't mix them up.
To remove table formatting Excel offers no single shortcut, but Alt, H, E, F in sequence clears formats from the current selection. When you remove formatting Excel keeps the values and drops only the styling — press Ctrl + A first if the whole sheet needs it.
To clear formatting in Google Docs, select the text and use Format → Clear formatting, or press Ctrl + \ on Windows (Cmd + \ on Mac). It resets font, size, color, and paragraph styles to the document default — the fastest fix when a paste brings in someone else's headings.
On the mobile app, select the text, tap the A icon at the top, and use the clear-formatting option under Text. For text you're about to paste, right-click → Paste without formatting, or Ctrl + Shift + V, drops the styling at the door — no cleanup pass needed.
ChatGPT and Claude answers carry Markdown symbols (**, #, -, `), smart quotes, em dashes, and sometimes hidden characters that break Word and CMS editors. The fastest way to remove ChatGPT formatting is the tool above: paste the answer, click once, and the symbols, styles, and hidden characters go together.
People remove ChatGPT formatting most often before pasting into email, Word, or a CMS — anywhere asterisks and hashes would show up as literal characters. If the AI text also needs zero-width spaces, lookalike letters, or watermark characters taken out, that is a deeper cleanup job.
For that deeper pass, use our AI Text Cleaner — or the Clean ChatGPT Text — read the guide: Remove ChatGPT formatting.
Every way to remove formatting from text, side by side — whether you need to remove table formatting, Excel cell styles, Word paragraph resets, or a quick plain-text paste. Bookmark this cheatsheet for the next paste that fights back.
| App | How to remove formatting | Shortcut |
|---|---|---|
| Word | How to remove all formatting in Word: Home → Clear All Formatting (eraser icon) | Ctrl + Space |
| Excel | Excel: remove all formatting — Home → Clear → Clear Formats | Alt, H, E, F |
| Excel table | Remove table formatting in Excel — Table Design → Convert to Range | — |
| Google Docs | Clear formatting in Google Docs — Format → Clear formatting | Ctrl + \ |
| Any app | Remove formatting from text online — paste into the tool above | Ctrl+Shift+V |
Remove hidden characters, Markdown symbols, and broken spacing from AI-generated text.
Markdown, ANSI colored text, and Unicode fonts for Discord messages.
Unicode bold, italic, and font styles that paste straight into LinkedIn posts.
Reveal hidden characters with code points and names, then strip them in one click.
The fastest way: paste the text into the box above and click Remove formatting — styles, HTML tags, Markdown symbols, emojis, hidden characters, and extra spaces are stripped in one pass, right in your browser. Inside Word, the equivalent is the Clear All Formatting button on the Home tab; in Google Docs it's Format → Clear formatting. For text you're about to paste somewhere, Ctrl + Shift + V pastes as plain text and skips cleanup entirely.
It's on the Home tab, in the Font group — the icon is an A with a pink eraser. Select your text first, then click it. The button resets the selection to the default style: font, size, color, bold, italic, and highlight all cleared at once. If you can't find it, use the Windows shortcut Ctrl + Space, which strips character-level formatting. Both do the same job for copied text that arrived with foreign styling.
Yes — on Windows, select the text and press Ctrl + Space. That clears character-level formatting in Word instantly. Word for Mac doesn't ship a default one-key shortcut for clear formatting, so on Mac use the Home tab's Clear All Formatting button, or add your own shortcut via Tools → Customize Keyboard. In Google Docs, the clear-formatting shortcut is Ctrl + \ (Cmd + \ on Mac). And for pasting, Ctrl + Shift + V keeps text only.
Three ways, fastest first: paste with Ctrl + Shift + V (Cmd + Shift + V on Mac) to drop formatting at paste time; run the text through this tool to strip styles, HTML, and hidden characters in one click; or use the app's own clear-formatting command (Word: Home → Clear All Formatting; Google Docs: Format → Clear formatting). All three end at the same place: plain text with default styling that behaves everywhere.
Yes. The HTML tags rule strips tags and comments — <p>, <b>, <div>, and friends all go — and decodes the common entities (&, <, >, ", ', ) back into real characters. Text pasted as raw HTML source comes out clean. Comparisons like "a < b" survive because only letter-starting tags are matched. Turn the rule off if you're cleaning text that legitimately contains code.
No. Everything runs in your browser with rule-based transforms — there are no server calls, no uploads, no logs. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and the tool still works. That makes it safe for contracts, internal documents, and unpublished drafts: the text you paste never leaves your device, and nothing is stored when you close the tab.
Removing formatting keeps the words and drops the styling — fonts, colors, bold, Markdown symbols, HTML tags, and hidden characters all go, the text stays. Deleting content removes the words themselves. This tool only ever touches formatting: your text comes out with identical wording as plain text. If a rule ever drops something you wanted to keep (say, the emojis), turn that rule off and clean again — every rule is a switch.
