A week ago, my colleague Petr Urban wrote about the fact that the text editor Microsoft Word cannot insert unformatted text with a shortcut, adding that this function is newly offered by the PowerToys 0.68 toolkit. Now it looks like they’ve heard his criticism in Redmond – the official Microsoft 365 Insider account on Thursday, March 9 reported on the social network Twitter about fundamental innovations in this direction.
“Copy and paste text without unnecessary formatting!” it says in the post. “Thanks to the new keyboard shortcut Insert text onlyavailable in Word for Windows and Word for Mac, you can save time and effort by eliminating the need to manually remove the original formatting.”
Inserting plain text
On the Microsoft 365 Insider blog then the news is presented by Ali Forelli – product manager of the team working on accessibility features. “I’m excited to announce that the Paste Text Only shortcut is now available in Word for Windows and Word for Mac!” announces in the introduction.
“Wouldn’t it be great if you could copy and paste text from a web page into a document and it would look good? Imagine not having to manually remove source formatting such as font size, type, or background color.” Forelli explains the main benefits of inserting text without formatting.
The good news is that Microsoft hasn’t reinvented the wheel in this regard and has chosen a combination of Ctrl + Shift + V (on MacOS Cmd + Shift + V). Users may recognize this from a number of other applications, such as Gmail, Slack, Chrome, MS Teams or the web version of Word.
For less experienced users, Forelli also added a brief user guide and a short instructional video.
- Select an area of text from the current document or from another document.
- In the Word document, place the cursor where you want the text to appear.
- Press the keys Ctrl + Shift + V (Cmd + Shift + V on MacOS). Note that the embedded content matches the formatting of the surrounding text, rather than preserving its original font size, color, etc.
It should be noted that Word has for quite some time allowed the user to remove formatting from anything they entered, additionally using a small bar that pops up and gives them the option to keep the original formatting, customize the formatting of the document, or use plain text. But the execution was a bit like scratching the left ear with the right hand – it worked, but it wasn’t entirely practical.
