Then you just copy the text you want, click the icon before you press Windows-V to paste it without the formatting, or anything else except the text.

The PureText freebie from Steve Miller makes pasting plain text a breeze.Īfter you download the program, it puts an icon in your system tray. All he did was download Steve Miller's free PureText utility. And he didn't have to go through a multistep process to create a Word macro.

My buddy said he could do me one better: He presses the Windows key and V to paste plain text he has copied from just about anywhere, into just about any application, not just Word. I thought this handy-dandy trick was a first-rate time-saver, especially when you consider that for those rare instances when I want to preserve the formatting of the source, or to include elements other than text, I simply press Shift-Insert.

The fact is, I rarely want to paste anything but the text, and I want it in the format of the file it's being added to, not the format of the source. That sums up a conversation I had with a coworker after I told him about the macro I created in Microsoft Word that converts my Ctrl-V keyboard shortcut into one that pastes text from a Web site, some other app, or elsewhere, minus the formatting, images, and any other nontext stuff. 'If you want something done right, do it yourself.'

Quick text paste