Guide

Formatting several blocks at once

Select several blocks and set their font, size, colour or spacing in one go — or copy one block's formatting and paste it onto others.

Selecting more than one block

Hold Ctrl (Cmd on a Mac) and click each block, click the first and Shift-click the last, or drag a box around them on the page. The inspector's Block tab then says how many you have selected and shows everything you can do to them together.

Shared formatting

Under Shared formatting you will find Font, Font size, Bold, Italic, Text colour, Space above and Space below. Changing one applies it to every selected block that has that setting, as one undo step — a single Ctrl+Z puts them all back.

Where the selected blocks already agree, the control shows their shared value. A block that never had a size set prints at 11pt, so it agrees with one set to 11pt.
Where they differ, the control says Mixed. It never shows one block's value as if the others matched it. Set the control and they all agree from then on; pressing Bold on a Mixed selection makes them all bold.
Text alignment sits in the row of actions above, beside Duplicate and Delete (Align text left, Align text center, Align text right on the selection bar). Lining up the blocks themselves — anchored blocks, by their edges or centers — is a different command: see Aligning and spacing anchored blocks.
Line spacing is not here. Whether a paragraph's line-height number is used at all depends on its line-spacing rule (Single, Double, Exactly and so on), so a single number across a selection would silently do nothing to some of them. Set line spacing per block, or copy it with Copy formatting below.

Blocks that get skipped, and why

Only Text, Markdown and List blocks have text formatting that covers the whole block. Not every one of them has every setting, so each control says who it reaches:

Applies to 2 of 3 selected blocks. List is skipped.

This is per setting, not per block. A List has a font, a size, bold and a colour, but no italic and no spacing, so it follows a size change and sits out "Space below". A Markdown block takes its bold and italic from the text you write, so it sits out Bold and Italic. Every other block is always skipped — images and shapes have no text, a table formats each cell, a label and value pair formats its label and its value separately, and a page number keeps its own settings. Set those on the block itself. A setting that none of your selected blocks has is not shown at all — there is never a control that looks live and does nothing.

Copy and paste formatting

Select one block and press the paintbrush button, Copy formatting, in the Block tab. Then select any number of blocks and press Paste formatting beside it. Each one takes on the look of the block you copied from.

What it copies: font, size, bold, italic, colour, alignment, line spacing, space above and below, indents, and the block's text style if it has one.
What it never copies: the words, the data fields, the conditions that decide whether a block appears, the background, border or padding, and a list's numbering, gap and bullet colour. If you want a block's content as well, use Duplicate.
It makes the target match, rather than merging. A setting the block you copied from does not carry is cleared on the blocks you paste onto, so the result is predictable.
A text style comes with it. If the block you copied from uses the style "Heading", the blocks you paste onto use "Heading" too — and follow it when you later change it. If it has no style, the blocks you paste onto lose theirs and take its look. If the style no longer exists where you paste (it was deleted after you copied), they take the style's look without the style.
Blocks that cannot take text formatting are named, not silently skipped — an "Applies to 1 of 3 selected blocks" line appears before you paste.
Pasting is one undo step, however many blocks it reached. Copying changes nothing in the document. What you copied stays available until you copy something else or leave the editor, so you can paste it again.

Text styles do the same job, permanently

Setting formatting across a selection changes those blocks once. If you want the same look to keep following one decision — change the size in one place and have every heading follow — give them a text style instead. See Text styles.

A worked example: restyle all the labels on a form

Hold Ctrl (Cmd on a Mac) and click each label Text block, or drag a box round them.
In Shared formatting, set Font size 9, Text colour grey. Controls that show Mixed become the same for every block.
Press Ctrl+Z once to see that it was a single undo step.
To use the same look on blocks you add later, create a text style from one of them (see Text styles).

If something looks wrong

A control shows "Mixed" even though they look alike. One block has an explicit setting and another uses its default. Set the control once and they agree.
"Applies to 2 of 3 selected blocks." The third (an Image, a Table, a page number) has no text formatting of the kind. Format it on its own.
Paste formatting changed the line spacing too. It copies the whole text look (font, size, bold, colour, alignment, line spacing, spacing and indents) and clears settings the source does not have.