The format painter copies the styling of one element and applies it to others, so a diagram stays visually consistent without re-dialling every colour, border, and text setting by hand. Style one element exactly how you want it, then spread that look across the canvas.
Painting a style
The format painter is the Format tool in the Palette's selection-mode dropdown (in its Edit group, beside Select, Hand and Eraser). Picking it opens the Format panel and walks you through two phases with an on-screen banner:
First the banner reads "Select a base element to copy its style". Click the element whose look you want to reuse. The panel's preview, which read "Nothing loaded", now shows it.
The banner then reads "Tap elements to paint this style onto them". Every element you click now takes on the base element's formatting, and the base stays loaded so you can keep going.
Click Done in the banner, or click empty canvas, to put the brush down and return to the tool you had before. Escape puts it down too and returns you to Select.
Choosing what it copies
The Format panel decides what the brush carries. Under Copies, five switches, all on by default:
- Fill: the fill colour, a header's fill, and its theme preset.
- Border: stroke colour, width, pattern and corners, and an arrow's line.
- Text: colour, size, weight, italic, underline, strikethrough, font and alignment.
- Effects: shadow, opacity, and animations (including an arrow's flow).
- Size: width, height, aspect-ratio lock, padding, and an icon's size and weight.
Switch every one off and the panel warns you that the brush has nothing to paint.
Under After painting, Keep the brush (the default) paints one element after another, and Paint once empties the brush after a single apply, for a quick one-off.
How painting works
The target ends up looking like the source in everything the brush carries that the source has, defaults included. If the source arrow uses the theme's colour and the target is red, painting turns the target back to the theme colour rather than leaving the red in place. The same goes for shadows, borders, and text styling. Painting between different kinds of element carries what they share: an image source, say, has no border or text to give, so the target keeps its own. Text formatting you applied to part of the target's label (a bold word, a coloured phrase) gives way to the painted style too; links in the label stay.
Arrows join in too: load an arrow as the source to copy its line colour, thickness, pattern, path style (straight, curved or elbow), arrowheads (including their colour), whether it routes behind shapes, flow animation, and label styling onto other arrows. Because the path style comes along, painting can re-route the target's line. Styles paint between like kinds only: any boxed element to another (a shape onto a sticky note works), and arrow to arrow. Clicking a shape while an arrow is loaded paints nothing, since the two share almost no formatting (with Paint once, it still empties the brush).
One thing stays put by design: the painter never touches position, so where your elements sit on the canvas is never disturbed. Each paint is an ordinary edit, so ⌘Z undoes it.
Because it only changes elements, the format painter is available to Editors only: Participants and view-only visitors don't get it. It is greyed out on an empty canvas and isn't offered in Plan or Draw mode.
Build one "reference" element with the exact colours, border, and text you want, then use the Format tool to bring every related element into line in a few quick clicks. Switch Size off first if the targets should keep their own dimensions.
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