One of my favorite services to provide is cleaning up documents.  I have clients who love to paste text in from 15 different presentations or training materials to create a new document quickly.  This is great for my clients’ clients because it means they aren’t getting off the shelf training or coaching materials…content is custom designed to meet their specific needs.  What cracks me up is when my clients then wonder why the heck the formatting is all out of whack.  I won’t kid you or even pull your chain about this…I make a lot of money off of this service!

Since everyone already knows I love free stuff I’m going to give you a couple of tips on the house!

For Word

One of the best ways around this nightmare is to use the paste special function.  You’ll find it under the Edit menu.  As long as you are pasting into an area formatted the correct way, clicking on the option to paste unformatted text will carry on the correct formatting rather than the format attached to the original text.

For Power Point

Everyone likes options right?  In PP you have two!

With two presentations open and you want some slides from one presentation inserted into a second presentation just copy the highlighted slides you want in the slide viewer, switch to the second presentation and paste…you can drag and drop to the correct order once they are all pasted.  When inserted this way the newly added slides mimic the formatting for the second presentation.

If you just want to paste in text it really doesn’t matter where it originates from!  As long as you start with a text box that is formatted correctly your new text will match your existing text.

How about a bonus branding tip?

For about the same amount as one redesign and proofread I can create a template for you to use all the time!  One just for you – your business – a specific client – your family – each different line of business like coaching or training - whatever.  It can be created in any of the programs from MS Office.  That way, when you copy and paste, you can paste into the format you truly want rather than paying me to fix it later!  Besides, who doesn’t need more branding?  Plus, if you are very dedicated to using your templates the documents you have will already be in a desirable format!

Nibbling away -

Sundi