An often over looked tool, the format painter is available across the whole office suite and can save you lots of time when setting up the visual aspect of your document.

Imagine you've created a proposal in Microsoft Word.

There is a specific paragraph that you want to stand out so spend some time choosing the right font, size, colour and line spacing so that it looks just right.  

As you're proof reading the document you think there are a couple of other areas of text that would look great if they looked the same as the previous block of text you formatted previously.

This is where the format painter comes in.

Instead of going back and re-creating every single area of the style you created you can reuse the formatting as easily as you would copy and paste a block of text.

To do this,

Highlight the area of text that contains the formatting you need.

Click the format painter icon

Click or highlight the area you want to apply the text to

Done!

As a final tip, it's not immediately obvious but you can apply your formatting in multiple places without needing to constantly click the format painter icon.

Follow the same procedure as above but instead of clicking the format painter icon double click it.

This allows you to click multiple areas of your document to paste your formatting. Once you're done click the format painter icon again or press the escape key on your keyboard.

You can use the format painter tool across the entire office suite with a wide variety of items.

Cell formats in Excel, auto shapes in Powerpoint, table elements in Word, etc, etc!

Try it out for yourself!