For example, if you select a piece of normal text and press the Bold button, that text is bolded if you immediately press the Bold button again while that bolded text is selected, it’s unbolded. Some commands in Word are essentially switches. For example, if you select a word and press Backspace to delete it, you won’t be able to repeat that command using F4. There are many other unrepeatable commands, including some rather surprising ones. As you can tell from that last point, selecting an item is not regarded as a repeatable command for the purposes of the F4 key.If you italicise a word, you can select another word and hit F4 to italicise it then select a sentence and press F4 to italicise it and so on, until you do something other than selecting an item. To get around this, use Word’s font formatting dialog box to apply all the formatting in one go Word will regard everything you do within the dialog box as a single action. Another example: if you select a word and click Bold and then Italic to format it, when you try F4 on another selection, all you’ll get is italic text, without the bold.

It won’t, as you might expect, simply repeat the last sentence or the last character you typed. For example, if you type two consecutive sentences and then press F4, Word will reproduce the whole two-sentence paragraph.

It’s not always clear what constitutes the last “command”.

If you select a heading and change the font to Algerian 48pt then select another heading and press F4, the heading’s font will remain the same but its point size will be change to 48pt (that is, if you applied the font selection before applying the font size). So if you insert a 4-by-3 table, press Enter to move down a line and then press F4, Word won’t insert another table it will insert another carriage return – that is, it will “press” the Enter key once more. It repeats the very last command no matter how trivial that command. There are several important things to keep in mind when using this wonderful key: If you apply underlining to a word then click another word, it, too, will be underlined. If you use the table creator to insert a four-column-by-three-row table and then click in another place in your document and press F4, Word will insert another 4-by-3 table. For example, if you type a paragraph and then press F4, Word types a copy of that paragraph. Pressing the F4 key tells Word to repeat the last action you took, so it’s useful not only for repeating formatting but for repeating many other commands in Word.

If you double-clicked the Format Painter in step 2, click it once more or press the Esc key to deactivate it.Click and drag over the item(s) you wish to “paint” with the formatting.If you want to apply the formatting to more than one element, double-click the Format Painter instead of single-clicking it. If you want to copy paragraph formatting as well as text formatting, then select an entire paragraph. If you want to copy text formatting only, select a word or section within a paragraph. Select the item which contains the formatting you want to copy.The Format Painter “picks up” the formatting of an existing piece of text or graphic and then paints it on the next thing you select. The Format Painter is the little icon on your toolbar that looks like a paintbrush (it’s located in the Home tab in Word 20, and on the Standard toolbar in earlier versions).

Apple pages format painter