I have been working on writing some stuff up. The other people involved use Word, and they send me versions with all kinds of fancy formatting. I have trouble because the formatting can change as I type, as I add a section header, as I delete a no-longer-needed paragraph, etc. I would like some way to strip out the extra formatting, reduce lists to regular text, etc. Any advice?
You know the menu path ‘Format’ > ‘Clear Direct Formatting’, equivalent to Ctrl+M? This will remove all the direct formats for the currently selected portion of the document.
I’ve found Clear Direct Formatting to be quite hit and miss when working with MSO documents. There are a lot of style and formatting features in LibreOffice that behave strangely when using MSO file formats.
Of course. I think there are more things done using styles in LibO Writer. Word may be more primitive and resort to direct formatting then. (I cannot test.) Opening documents created by MS Office(R) in one of its specific formats, LibreOffice has to map a lot of content description from an alien document model onto its own. XLSX and ODS aren’t simply two ways of talking about the “same document”. I am afraid there never will be a way to get complete and reliable interoperability,
Another method:
- Place other text in the clipboard (
Ctrl-VorCtrl-Insert) - Paste Special (
Ctrl-Shift-V) - Choose
Unformatted text
What you then get is plain-text, with no formatting of any kind. Depending on the selected item, there can also be a variety of other selections to paste.