How to Copy/Paste Plain Text Without Formatting on PC – Guide

Cut, copy, and paste commands are essential tools when working on a computer, and you’ll find them throughout Windows. It’s easy to move things around when you know how to cut. By understanding how to copy and paste efficiently in Windows, you can dramatically reduce the time you spend creating materials on your computer or device. Copying and pasting is one of the best ways to save time. features on a computer. However, this comes with a common problem: pasted text retains its original formatting, which is often not what you want. The paste is universally used feature of a program and operating system that allows the user to copy text or an image from one location and place it in another location. Along with this extremely useful feature comes an unwanted source format. When copying text with the mouse button or the Ctrl+C command, the user not only copies the text, but also the format attached to the text. This little problem becomes problematic when you copy a large body of text. If you select a lot of text and press Ctrl+C, you will copy not only the content of the text, but also the format of that text to the clipboard. So when you want to paste it into another app, paste the content and format at the same time. This is a normal copy and paste process that we do on our computers almost every day. But in many situations we want the text to just copy and paste because the format that comes with the text often gets in the way. up the format we already defined up.

Copy/paste plain text without formatting to your computer

Use keyboard shortcuts

The default shortcut Ctrl + V (or Cmd + V on a Mac) pastes the text with all the original markup. But many programs include a secondary shortcut that allows you to paste without formatting. On Windows, you can use Ctrl + Shift + V combination to paste without formatting in several important programs like Google Chrome. If the app you need to paste into doesn’t support this, check out the options below for other ways. If you’re a Mac user, you’re all set. macOS includes the shortcut Option + Command + Shift + V to paste without formatting anywhere in the operating system. While it’s a pretty clunky key combination, it doesn’t require any additional software.

Using PureText on Windows

Windows users who often need to paste without formatting should install PureText. It is a simple utility that adds a new useful keyboard shortcut for this procedure. On Windows 10, you can install PureText from the Microsoft Store for automatic updates. If you use an earlier version of Windows or don’t want to install the Store version, get it from the PureText website. Once installed, you can right-click the PT icon in the system tray and choose Options to access the settings panel. If you wish, you can change the default Windows + V shortcut to something else. We also recommend unchecking the Play a sound box as there is no need for this.

Use Paste Options in Microsoft Office

Office applications, especially Microsoft Word, are one of the biggest culprits of unwanted text formatting. To avoid having to manually correct every piece of text you paste into a Word document, you can take advantage of Office’s paste options. After pasting something into Word, Excel or other Office applications, keep an eye on the Paste Options box. Hover over it and you can choose from three options: Instead of using the panel that comes up after pasting, you can right click and access the same pasting options from this menu. Alternatively, press Ctrl + Alt + V to open the Paste Special dialog. This gives you essentially the same options without having to change the paste method later.

Paste into Notepad first

Most text boxes support rich text, which is why they preserve the formatting of what you last copied. However, basic text editors like Notepad don’t support anything but plain text. Because of that, you can use Notepad as an intermediary to paste without formatting. Just copy the text, paste it into Notepad and copy it again. Copying it from Notepad will get you a plain version that doesn’t contain any formatting. While this works, we recommend using one of the options above if possible. This is a good backup, but not efficient. For a slightly faster method, you can paste into a more readily available plain text box, such as your browser’s address bar or the search box on your Start menu.

Final note

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