The Format Painter seems to be everyone's friend. When you discovered it, you probably thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. But it is not what it claims to be!
Suppose you have a long legal memo that needs a nice layout. How would you tackle this task?
Of course you can go through the documents, select relevant titles and apply all the required formatting one by one. Let’s say that we want all titles at the first level to be 16 points blue, bold, Arial, while those at the second level must be 14 points red and underlined.
The disadvantage is that this will take, like, forever.
Most users will be quick to point out that there’s a better way, by using the Format Painter. This tool essentially picks up a certain kind of “paint” from one paragraph, and then applies that same paint to some other paragraph. I’m sure you learned this trick from a colleague, friend or family member.
What most users don’t know, is that you can also double-click on the Format Painter. This will cause the tool to “keep” its paint, so you can apply the same paint again and again, simply by clicking on new paragraphs.
The Format Painter drastically speeds up the layout-process. It’s one of the many occasions where Microsoft tried to be helpful by adding an easy tool that allows users to skip Word-training. But Microsoft actually made everything worse, because... the Format Painter is actually pure evil in the context of long documents.
Sure, use it for one-pagers with a limited lifespan. But don’t use it ever again in other documents, except if you really, really know what you’re doing.
Essentially, Word allows you to apply formatting by selecting text and then applying characteristics such as bold, italic, color, alignment, indentation, and so on, directly from the toolbar.
Local formatting is like fast food: you are immediately satisfied and happy because you see good results on the screen. But this happiness only lasts as long as you don’t think about the long-term effects. Because in the long term, all this direct formatting undermines the consistency of your document. For example, if you’re like most users, you — or whoever comes after you — will at some point forget that the first level was actually 16 points blue, instead of 14 points. Or that there are two empty lines after a title on level one.
Local formatting also seems fast because you don’t need to prepare anything. You just click a few buttons and are happy because you see immediate results on the screen. Of course you don’t “feel” that you’re accumulating hundreds of lost seconds because you have to apply the same formatting again and again by clicking buttons in your toolbar. You will however acutely curse local formatting when your client would suddenly ask you to change all titles from Arial to Times New Roman in a 50-page document. Or when you have to manually hunt for wrong page breaks in a 150-page document.
The evil nature of the Format Painter lies in the fact that it masks your pain, because it allows you apply multiple layout settings in one go. The Format Painter doesn’t solve the layout consistency problem, the slowness of the layout process or the inability to centrally make changes. No, the Format Painter merely makes formatting less painful so that the process becomes bearable enough for most users most of the time. And in doing so, the Format Painter prevents the styles system from getting the sunshine it deserves.
Styles are a much cleaner, long-term solution to many problems in Word. But by trying to be helpful and introducing the Format Painter, Microsoft actually opened the gates of Word-hell, so that we are now stuck with documents that have local formatting all over the place, and we’re all collectively cleaning each other’s mess.
