Copy and Paste Without the Baggage
Have you ever tried to copy something simple from a web page into Outlook or MS Word only to see it mess up your formatting? The Windows clipboard “helps” you by copying the formatting information from the website. Sometimes that’s exactly what you want, but more often it’s incompatible with the formatting of the document or e-mail you are pasting it into. So how do you stop that helpfulness? You can’t turn off the rich format feature, but there are ways around it. Here are two simple workarounds:
The First Way
Copy your text as you normally would. Then in your document select “Edit | Paste Special…” You’ll get the following dialog box:
Select “Unformatted Text” and then press OK. Not exactly as easy as Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V, but it keeps from messing up your document or e-mail. These steps work exactly the same in Outlook, if you are using MS Word as the engine for writing e-mail.
The Second Way
Copy your text as you normally would. Then open NotePad (not WordPad) or an equivalent text-only editor. (We prefer TextPad, but that’s going to be an article in and of itself.) You’re going to use NotePad as a staging area to strip off the extra formatting that tags along in the clipboard. So, paste your clipping into NotePad and then copy it again and then paste that into the MS Word or Outlook. Although this method is cumbersome, for some software you may have to resort to this if it doesn’t have a Paste Special feature.
Read more: Uncategorized, Windows
excy wrote:
Or use something like PureText: http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/ which uses a different key combination, Windows-v by default, to remove formating and paste at the same time.
Posted 12 Mar 2007 at 2:00 pm ¶
vcnickels wrote:
I actually don’t use a external editor unless I’m copying a lot of data. I simply copy the text I want and paste it into the address bar and copy it again.
I keep the address bar toolbar on my task bar. It’s uses aside from the obvious are legion.
Posted 14 Mar 2007 at 8:01 am ¶
craig wrote:
venickels: Hmm, I never thought to use the address bar to strip the formatting. Good tip. That reminds me of a similar tip that has to do with using the memo field of an Outlook contact as a staging area. I will write that one up shortly.
Posted 14 Mar 2007 at 11:25 am ¶
Michael wrote:
I use Paste Special | Unformatted Text a lot (so much so I have a Word macro that saves me the menu clicking). However, Paste Special does not work in Outlook when the email is HTML-formatted (or at least on my system it doesn’t - option is greyed out). I’ve also done the NotePad option, but it is a little cumbersome.
Posted 14 Mar 2007 at 12:25 pm ¶