A fast way of providing uniform formatting across multiple PowerPoint shapes—for example, when making a navigation menu—is to use a clever tool in PowerPoint called the Format Painter. It’s located on the Home tab just below the Copy button (Figure 1).

The Format Painter gives you the ability to copy and paste only the formatting associated with a shape, rather than the entire shape itself. Applying the Format Painter changes a shape’s fill, line, and text characteristics, such as font style and color.

Let’s say, for instance, you already have a group of formatted navigation shapes made, positioned, and linked, such as in Figure 2.

Then you decide a solid blue fill is not really what you want after all and maybe something a little fancier would be better. In that case, starting from scratch or copying and pasting entire shapes probably would not be the most efficient way to make the change. Instead, reformat one of the existing shapes to have the look you want, and then use the Format Painter to copy and apply that look to the other shapes.

The Format Painter button has the appearance of a paint brush. Notice, however, that the tool is initially dimmed (“grayed out”) as in Figure 3, meaning the tool is unavailable. The tool becomes available (active) only after you select a shape that will be used as the tool’s formatting source (the look that will be copied).

Therefore, the first step is to find (or make) a formatted shape you want to use as a pattern and assure that shape is selected before clicking the Format Painter button. Let’s give our top shape a new gradient fill and use that look as the Format Painter’s source. For demonstration purposes, I’ll also change the color and effects of the shape’s text (Figure 4).

With the newly formatted shape selected, click the Format Painter button on the Home tab. After the click, a paint brush appears next to the mouse pointer. It’s now said to be loaded.

Next, click the second shape down. That shape immediately takes on all the formatting of the source shape. It’s that easy.

IMPORTANT: What if when you clicked your destination shape, only the text color changed and not the fill color as expected? Here’s what happened in that case. The Format Painter actually has two levels of operation. It can copy ONLY the text formatting or BOTH the text formatting and the shape formatting. If the goal is to copy only text formatting, make your initial click inside the source shape’s text area before clicking the Format Painter button and then the destination shape. Those actions change only text. However, if you begin by clicking the source shape away from the text (closer toward its edge) and then click the Format Painter and the destination shape, those actions apply all aspects of the source shape’s formatting to the destination shape.

Yeah, it can be a little confusing. If necessary, repeat the above steps to get the effect you want.

Very well, that process worked fine for changing a single shape, but what if you need to transform all the remaining ones as well? In that case, keep the cursor permanently “loaded” by placing it in what’s called “sticky mode.” To do so, repeat the above procedures but this time double-click the Format Painter rather than single-clicking it. Now you can click multiple shapes in succession with ease. To take the cursor out of sticky mode, either click the Format Painter button again, or press the Escape key.

As a point of interest, an alternative approach would have been to first select all the shapes, and then make the initial format change. Doing so would have applied the format changes to all the shapes identically and simultaneously.

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