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My whole document, 60+ pages, has a light-brown dotted line, kind of like an ellipsis, under all the text. After a lot of research, it is not hidden text, which is what most of my research has said it was. If I right-click on a sentence with the formatting, it gives me a choice to "Replace Direct Formatting with Style Normal. If I do this, the underlining disappears, but I am not allowed to format the whole document this way, just one line at a time. Can anyone tell my why this is appearing in my document? Now that it has occurred in one document that was saved, it is default!

Kimberly Whitney-Hayes
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I had the same issue and found the solution. I'm using Office 2016. To disable the brown underline go to File - Options - Advanced - "Editing Options" and deselect "Mark Formatting inconsistencies". It should all disappear.

Donald Duck
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lau
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  • I have been using Word for a long time but this feature is new to me - and as a user who often works with others on collaboratively-edited documents, I can see this as being an incredibly useful feature to help me flag and fix issues caused by merging or pasting text from other Word documents. I realize you're telling me how to turn it off, but this also shows me how I would turn it ON when desired! – dr.nixon Jun 10 '19 at 21:45
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There's an answer direct from the Microsoft support database that may be of assistance.

The link includes the question "how can I selectively remove direct formatting" and the querying party doesn't want to lose fonts and italics.

The answer involves selecting all text, then...

In the Styles pane (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S), click the Style Inspector icon, and click the Clear Character Formatting button.

There's a step prior to the one I've quoted that involves search and replace that may be applicable to your requirements.

fred_dot_u
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I ran across this issue in Outlook 2016 in the New Message window. It took a little digging - but the 'Formatting inconsistencies' option in Outlook 2016 is located at:

In Outlook > File > Options > Mail (choice on Left) > Editor Options (Button on Right). In Editor window > Advanced (choice on Left) > scroll down to > 'Editing Options' section > and UNCHECK the "Mark Formatting inconsistencies" and the "Keep track of formatting" boxes.

Click OK to Save Changes > Click Ok to exit Outlook Options.
No more brown dots under text in your Outlook Message.

Cyndi
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