How to Format Text in Microsoft Loop Easily 2026

Click into any text block on a Loop page and select the specific words or sentence you want to style. The moment you select text, a small floating toolbar appears directly above the highlighted selection with Bold, Italic, Underline, Strikethrough, a text-color icon, and a link button — no menu-hunting required. This inline toolbar is the fastest path for one-off formatting in the middle of writing, since it appears exactly where your cursor already is instead of pulling you away to a sidebar.

The same B I U S formatting controls also appear in a persistent bar directly beneath certain content blocks, like the sample text field under a task table. Typing into that field and clicking Bold or Italic there works identically to the floating inline version — it's simply anchored to the block instead of appearing on selection, which is useful when you're formatting as you type rather than going back to style something you already wrote.

Clicking the text-color icon in either toolbar expands into a full menu split into two sections — Color, for the text itself, and Background, for a highlight behind it — each offering the same row of options: Gray, Pink, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue green, Blue, and Purple. This is where formatting goes beyond bold and italic into visual organization, letting you color-code categories, flag risks in red, or highlight a key decision in yellow so it's impossible to scroll past without noticing.

Once you know the toolbar options, the keyboard shortcuts behind them are faster for anyone doing heavy editing. Ctrl+B on Windows or Cmd+B on Mac bolds the current selection instantly, with the same pattern extending to I for italic and U for underline, letting you format without ever taking your hands off the keyboard. These shortcuts apply to whatever text is currently selected, so the workflow is the same as the toolbar — select, then trigger the style — just without the extra click.

Beyond character-level styling, Loop recognizes markdown-style shorthand for structure. Typing a hash mark followed by a space at the start of an empty line converts it into a heading, with additional hash marks producing smaller heading levels. A hyphen or a number followed by a space similarly converts the line into a bulleted or numbered list item as you type, which is considerably faster than reaching for a list button in a toolbar every time you start a new item.

Once the content is styled, scroll back through the page and check that heading levels are used consistently — don't mix a top-level heading with a smaller one for sections that should read as equals — and that color use stays purposeful rather than decorative. A page where every other line is a different color stops communicating anything; reserve color for the handful of things that genuinely need to stand out. Loop syncs all of this styling live, so the version teammates see updates the moment you finish.