How do I edit multiple paragraphs at once in Gutenberg?

Hi Martin, As you know, in Gutenberg, you can select multiple blocks at once by holding the “Shift” key while selecting the blocks you wish to edit. But this only allows you to cut, copy, or paste multiple blocks at once. It's not intended to facilitate editing the styles of every paragraph at once. While this seem confusing or limiting, I think the core team is operating under the assumption that most folks rarely want to apply the same style (e.g., bold, italic, etc.) across multiple paragraphs of text. With that in mind, what specific edit(s) are you attempting to make across all your paragraphs? If you're finding that you must override the styles for every single paragraph of text you create, it would be a better solution to edit the stylesheet for your theme, which would then apply the correct styles across your entire site, without requiring you to make edits to every text block individually. Does that help?

Well this is very intresting! And maybe I'm not being that stupid. I am really the only person on the planet who wants all my paras to have the same styling?! So here's what i was attemting to do: Paste 8 paras from MS Word and apply the same color, font-size and font to all paras (but not necessarily the same as the theme <p> styling. In classic the text would all come into one block, I would then highlight the text and apply the styling. As you say, I could edit the theme style sheet - this is what i would regualrly do but how do you apply a class / ID to all the type if it's neatly in 8 diferent blocks?  

That's what I figured, since color, font, and size are the most common things you'd want to change. Your stylesheet should apply those automatically. But here's the thing... Copying text from a Microsoft Word document then pasting it into a post or page within WordPress is generally a horrible idea. Here's why... Microsoft Word was never intended to create content for the web. Instead, it uses proprietary formatting that inserts a bunch of extra HTML code inline with your text. You won't see this extra code in the WordPress visual editor, but if you switch to the WordPress HTML editor, you'll see TONS of extra code throughout your blog post. And that extra code will override the styles of your theme, because it's inline. That code has no reason to be there other than to cause formatting problems on your blog. One thing you can try is to use “Paste Without Formatting,” or “Paste and match Style” instead of the default Paste function. But, my advice would be to stop authoring in Word, then pasting into WordPress. Instead, use a more standards-compliant text editor that won't inject a ton of extraneous code into your text. Better still, check out Iceberg: https://useiceberg.com It's a WordPress plugin that replaces the default Gutenberg authoring experience with a beautiful, flexible writing editor that's purpose-built for crafting posts. Watch the demo videos on their site to see how it works. I love it so much I've stopped using IA Writer to author my posts outside of WordPress. And I much prefer it to the Gutenberg experience for writing long-form content. Hope this helps!

Hi Shawn I actually left a piece out of my narrative in so far as I don't actually paste directly from Word for reasons you stated – I tend to 'scrub' the text in a text editor beforehand. Your tip about iceberg is very useful - looks very enticing. What is most interesting to me is that my dip into Gutenberg has taught me that it's a system really developed for bloggers and not for developers despite. Blogging was, of course, the original idea behind WP and despite the fact that half the world's websites are now WP driven, the WP folk have fondly stuck to the idea that it's first and foremost a blogging tool. I use the WPbakery plugin which, whilst not being absolutely perfect, is a pretty bonny tool for creating websites. As stated in a previous post – I always fear that when a software developer creates an entirely new methodology the old systems gradually depricate and when the tide goes out we who have stuck to the old ways are left stranded. I am now more confident that the bloggers will go off into the sunset with Gutenberg and web developers will continue to embrace tools such as WPBakery and Elementor. As it happens – and talking of learning new tricks – I have spent most of this week being obliged by a client to amend much of their website built in Wix. It's now Friday morning and I'm feeling quite unwell from the experience. For the record I have been using your excellent 'intro to Gutenberg' video tutorials – thank for taking the time to create these; beautifully presented, right out of the top draw. Best Martin