Holding shift while pasting will remove all the formatting for most programs! Still annoying but usually an easy fix.

I'd never heard of this, thanks for the tip. I just tried it in Word and had no luck, but it worked in Chrome. Any other programs you're aware of that respect this?

Use Ctrl-Alt-V to paste without formatting in most Office apps. Lots of other Windows apps support Ctrl-Shift-V though.

Wow, thanks!

Yeah the two main places where it comes up for me is LebreOffice and Google Docs! I'm surprised as word doesn't have it as its quite useful. It's really nice when I'm doing citations as most titles have some annoying color / font size.

I think there were a couple other programs that worked with it but I forget them! I've had quite a lot of success though as It seems like most of the programs I use respect it.

Word just has you press Ctrl+V to paste the text, and then Ctrl again to select the type of formatting you want to paste it with. It's not as elegant as Ctrl+Shift+V, but it works.

This might be because Word overrides system shortcuts (i.e. the 'paste without formatting' in this case). Google Docs tries to do this in the browser as well, but it happens to support this particular shortcut.

Is "paste without formatting" really a system shortcut? I'd never heard of it before. I feel like it might be something semi-standard that apps implement?

I believe I may have seen it in a shortcut editor somewhere, but I suppose I could be misremembering or that could have been a one-off implementation.

Most people who aren't programmers expect formatting to be copied and pasted.

Having watched my mother swearing at this on numerous occasions I would not make that assumption.

I think it depends on what you're copying. If you're copying text only, then no. But if you're copying text with images or other non-text elements, then possibly yes.

I think it also depends on where you are copying from and pasting into. If it's within the same document, you likely want to maintain everything. If it is within the same app (different docs), you may want to maintain everything. If it is across apps... I cannot imagine the use case for maintaining formatting.

But as you well said, respecting images, tables and the like is one thing. The other is keeping fonts.

Anyhow... so many options that a single feature doesn't fit all. The problem with Windows is the lack of a uniform solution to paste without formatting (my complaint) as opposed to macOS.

> But as you well said, respecting images, tables and the like is one thing. The other is keeping fonts.

Oh, to clarify: I meant: "if you're copying text along with images, you probably want to keep the text formatting [fonts etc.] too, whereas if you're only copying text, you probably don't want the formatting either." It's not a perfect heuristic by any means, but I think it'd be better than the current situation.

> If it is across apps... I cannot imagine the use case for maintaining formatting

You have some formatted text (maybe some bold or italic in a line) on a webpage, you want to copy it into an email (lets set aside the argument that email should be text only).

I like to use that: https://stevemiller.net/puretext/