Free generator, copy and paste
Remove strikethrough and every other line
Paste styled text, get plain text. Lines, slashes, underlines, superscript and small caps all come off. Accents and emoji stay.
- plain text
Updated · strikethroughtext.online
Remove strikethrough in Word, Excel and Google Docs
If the line is formatting rather than characters, select the struck text and press the same shortcut that adds it. It’s a toggle.
| App | Windows | Mac |
|---|---|---|
| Word | Click ab̶c̶ on the Home tab, or Ctrl + Space to clear all character formatting | ⌘ + Shift + X |
| Excel | Ctrl + 5 | ⌘ + Shift + X |
| Google Docs | Alt + Shift + 5 | ⌘ + Shift + X |
| Google Sheets | Alt + Shift + 5 | ⌘ + Shift + X |
Word: if the line keeps coming back as you type, Track Changes is on and you’re seeing deleted text. Accept or reject the changes on the Review tab instead.
Excel: if a row strikes itself again, a conditional formatting rule is doing it. Check Home → Conditional Formatting → Manage Rules.
Google Docs: Ctrl + \ (⌘ + \ on a Mac) clears all formatting from the selection, strikethrough included. In suggesting mode, struck text is a suggested deletion: accept or reject it rather than removing the line.
How this works
Copy-and-paste strikethrough is made of Unicode combining marks: an invisible character after every letter that draws the line. To remove it, the tool deletes those marks and nothing else. It also removes glitch marks from zalgo text and maps superscript, subscript and small capital letters back to ordinary ones, so ᵗᵉˣᵗ becomes text and ᴘʟᴀɪɴ becomes plain.
The result is ordinary, searchable text that you can paste into a document, a spreadsheet or a search box.
When you need this
Searching. You found a post with a struck-through product name and want to look it up. Search engines and in-app search don’t match styled characters, so clean it first.
Fixing your own bio. You pasted strikethrough into a profile months ago and now want it gone. Copy your bio, clean it here and paste it back.
Accessibility. Screen readers can read combining marks aloud as a long run of noise. If you’re quoting styled text in an email or a document, the plain version is kinder to everyone.
Data cleanup. Styled names in a spreadsheet won’t sort or match properly. Clean the column, then compare.
What’s left alone
The cleaner only removes the marks this site produces, so legitimate text survives:
- Accented letters, whether typed as one character (é) or as a letter plus an accent mark.
- Emoji, including skin tones and family sequences.
- Line breaks and spacing.
One limitation: superscript letters without a matching capital (like ᶜ) come back as lowercase, so the case of a few capital letters may change.
Formatting is a different thing
If the strikethrough is real formatting, in Word, Google Docs, Excel or an email, this tool isn’t needed. Select the text and press the same shortcut you’d use to add strikethrough. It toggles. The guides for Google Docs, Word and Excel list each one.
Questions people ask
Why can’t I just delete the line?
Copy-and-paste strikethrough is not formatting. The line is made of invisible characters sitting between the letters, so there is nothing to select and delete. This tool removes those characters for you.
Will this remove accents from my text?
No. It only removes the specific marks used for lines and slashes, plus the special superscript, subscript and small caps letters. Ordinary accents like é, ü or ñ are left alone.
How do I remove strikethrough in Word or Google Docs?
Select the struck text and press the strikethrough shortcut again: Alt + Shift + 5 in Google Docs, or the strikethrough button on the Home tab in Word. To clear all formatting at once, press Ctrl + \ in Google Docs (Cmd + \ on a Mac) or Ctrl + Space in Word.