How to paste text without formatting in Word for Office 365
You can paste clipboard text and images in Word for Office 365 . Images are generally not a problem but when you copy text from other documents, or from your browser, the text may have its own formatting applied to it. When you paste this text in Word, whether you do it via the Ctrl+V keyboard shortcut or you use the Paste button, the text is pasted with the formatting it came with. Here’s how you can paste text without formatting in Word for Office 365.
Paste options
The Paste button by default does not remove formatting however, Word has two other buttons for pasting text that can do two specific things; one can remove the formatting, the other can match it to the document you’re pasting it in. If you want to test it out, go ahead and copy the name of this section and then switch over to a Word document.
Click the little arrow under the Paste button. You will see three buttons in the menu. The button with the arrow will match the formatting of the pasted text to that of the document, and the button with the A on it will remove formatting from it and paste it as plain text.
Keyboard shortcut
On most apps that you can paste text in, you can remove the formatting with the Ctrl+Shift+V keyboard shortcut. In Word, this shortcut does nothing however, if you’d like to use it to paste text without formatting, you can set it up to do so.
Open Word and go to File>Options. Select the Customize Ribbon tab. At the bottom, you will see ‘Keyboard options’. Click the ‘Customize’ button next to it. In the new window that opens, look for ‘All Commands’ in the Categories column. Select it and then move to the column on the right. The commands here are sorted alphabetically. Select ‘PasteTextOnly’.
Once selected, click inside the ‘Press new shortcut key’ field and tap the Ctrl+Shift+V keyboard shortcut. You can use any other shortcut if you want, just make sure it doesn’t clash with other shortcuts. Click Assign and close the window.
Copy text that has some formatting applied to it to your clipboard and go to a Word document. Use the keyboard shortcut you just created to paste it. The text will be pasted but without any formatting.
If you’d like to create a shortcut that matches the document’s formatting, you can follow the same process but select ‘PasteDestinationFormatting’ after you select All Commands, and then record a keyboard shortcut.
