Clean text formatting when pasting with a simple shortcut
Paste as plain text can be done in seconds with just a keyboard shortcut. No need for fancy tools and it works in almost any Windows app.
Who doesn’t know about Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V, aka Copy and Paste shortcuts? You can copy from a lot of places in Windows and paste into your documents. It’s easy and convenient.
But there’s also a downside we don’t talk about too often. Even if you copy text from a document, what’s actually be copied is the text + formatting. This poses a specific challenge, if you paste into a document with different styling: you get two very different looking portions of text.
Something like this:
The “Paste as plain text” keyboard shortcut
Sometimes you copy text from a document or webpage, and you want to paste it into a different document without the original style. You don’t want the bold style, italic, font, color, spacing, etc. And definitely you don’t want to spend time matching the styling between sections of text.
You just want to paste the text and keep the same appearance as the document you’re pasting into.
Fortunately, there is a keyboard shortcut that can do this for you in most Windows programs.
It’s Ctrl + Shift + V. This is a universal keyboard shortcut worth remembering.
The shortcut will paste the text from the clipboard as plain text, without any formatting. It’s faster and simpler than using the right-click menu or other options. The contents of the clipboard will be stripped of all formatting, and only the text string is pasted at the cursor.
You can still use Ctrl + V to paste the normal way, with keeping the original text styling.
Limitations: The only program that doesn’t support this shortcut is Microsoft Word. But Word has its own paste options that you can choose from. And, depending on when you read this, it’s possible your version of Word already has the shortcut included.
How I did it in the past. Not anymore!
Before I found out about this method of pasting as plain text I used to first paste into Notepad, a program that doesn’t support text styling, then copy the un-styled text, and paste it again at the final destination. It was not handy, but it worked.
No matter what method you are using, pasting text without formatting is useful when you want to avoid mismatched styles in your document. It saves you time and hassle. I just hope you can remember and use this handy keyboard shortcut.
Previous tips you may have missed
Clipboard history: the last 20 things you copied are available at any time in Windows 10 and 11 via the clipboard history. Just press Win + V and insert past copied items anywhere you want.