Microsoft Word creates a lot of data behind the surface of your document. It's these built-in formatting profiles that tend to cause us so much trouble when we try to format our book straight from Word. These next steps are how we circumvent this behavior and create a clean document that behaves the way we want it to.

Identify & Mark Italics

In a moment, we're going to "blow out" all the document's formatting, but before we can do that, we need to protect any special formatting we have inside the manuscript. These might include italics, bold, or images.

Mark each instance of special formatting (from now on I'll just call them italics) with a symbol not found in your manuscript. I use a "+" on either side of the italics.

Continue through entire document, finding and marking the opening and closing of each special formatting.

Go to:

Find > Advanced Find>

Format > Font >

Font Style: Italic

Now click Find Next and place a "+", or symbol of your choice, at the beginning and end of word or phrase that needs the special formatting.

Once you've marked all the special format instances, you're ready to move on to the next step.

Use Notepad++ (or similar free program) to Clear Formatting Gremlins

CTRL-A to copy the entire manuscript.

Open Notepad++.

Paste in manuscript.

Choose >Edit > Blank Operations > Trim Trailing and Leading Spaces

Then choose Blank Operations again and select > Tab to Space

CTRL-A, CTRL-C to copy manuscript.

Create New Document

Paste corrected manuscript into the new document.

Select Find, and enter the "+" or the symbol you used.

Find next, then reset the italics or other special formatting.

Finally, Choose Replace. Input the symbol you used, then nothing for the replace with box. Choose Replace all, then press delete.

Save (Do this often!)