I remember that in older versions of Word, pressing Ctrl+i would italicize all the words of a selection; pressing the same shortcut again would make all words normal. This behavior seems to have changed. Selecting text that contains both italicized and regular text and pressing Ctrl+i now alternates the italics, that is, words in italics become regular and regular words are italicized! The same with bold.

This change may be nice when you need it, but I guess only seldom one would like such a switching. In most cases you just want to add or remove italics to your selection completely, to italicize or not all words. For instance, I see some words in italics and I want to make them regular. Instead of selecting those words one by one, in case some regular text interferes, I used to select a larger part of the text containing everything, including italics and non italics, the I pressed Ctrl+i to italicize everything and again the same shortcut to make everything regular. This way I was achieving what I wanted rapidly. All of this is gone now, but here is how the problem can be solved.

Download this little macro and import it in your normal template (here are directions on how to import macros in Word, in case you are not familiar with the task). Then go to Word’s Options > Customize Ribbon > Keyboard Shortcuts and associate a shortcut you can define at will (I use Ctrl+Shift+i) with the macro named “ClearFormat”. Pressing your shortcut you can remove all formatting from a selection, italics, bold…, all of your selection becomes regular. You can also press Ctrl+Space to remove all formatting.

Now that your selection is all regular you can italicize everything by just pressing Ctrl+i or make it bold by pressing Ctrl+b, locate specific words to format, etc.

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Download the ClearFormat Macro

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