This is one of my pet peeves with modern machines - when I copy some text from one place and paste in another, it often comes along with pretty colors and formatting.
An example of this would be copying a phone number from a web page and pasting it into a Word document.
Clearly, this is due to the clipboard data being presented in multiple “flavors” and Word says “You have rich text? Great!”
My current fix for this is to open a plain text editor and paste the text there, and then copy it from the text editor, and then finally paste the “cleansed” clipboard data into Word.
I’m looking for an elegant way to do this, preferably a general solution (i.e. not depending on a special Word feature).
I also have a Mac, with the same issue, so if anyone knows how to do this cleanly on a Mac, I’ll be happy too.
Not quite what’s wanted, but click Start | Run, type Clipbrd.exe and hit Enter. You’ll bring up the ClipBook Viewer and you can change the format of what’s in the clipboard by using the View menu.
Yes!
That’s why I specified that things like “Paste Special” are not my preferred option. The problem with those features is that they are different for every app.
Of course, the thread from 3 days ago has the answer. m1k3g provides a link to a tool called Pure Text that does precisely what I am looking for.
If you are using an application that doesn’t support “Paste Special” or something similar you can always paste the text into Notepad, and then copy the result from Notepad and then paste again. Pasting text into Notepad will discard fonts, colors, sizes, attributes, etc.
Minor7, you should check out dwc1970’s idea. This fixes everything.
Seriously, though, I just went and grabbed PureText and installed it easy as pie, and it works fine, at least on this machine. I’m putting it on all of them!
I don’t know why I don’t think to ask these things at the Dope…
This has been one of my pet peeves for ages, but I’d never run across any way to get rid of all the silly formatting without using notepad or Paste Special.
Also, Firefox has a “copy as plain text” plug in application. I use this at work for copying legal citations from a website to be used in office documents where I don’t want the formatting from the website.
PureText works fine on another machine today. Also I notice some Paste Special functions offer various things that don’t include plain text.
On further reflection, the clipboard stacks various versions of whatever you copy, with the simplest and least complete version (the ASCII characters, in the case of formatted text) buried at the bottom of the stack. An application’s Paste function takes versions off the top of the stack and if it can’t figure them out it goes to the next version, using the most complicated and complete version it can. PureText must pop all but the last version off this stack, I guess.
Data on the clipboard is not necessarily on a stack of “best to crappiest” – it is presented as a series of available data “flavors” which are more comparable to MIME types (I don’t know all the nitty gritty details). An app can ask for any flavor that is in the list currently on the clipboard. All PureText needs to do is ask for the “text/plain” flavor and then perform a new clipboard “copy” with just one flavor. Of course, you are right in that the target application does have its own preferred sequence for flavors – MSWord seems to prefer everything over plain text.
One of the more interesting data flavor things I have found is when I copy cells from an Excel spreadsheet and paste them in an email – the selection is converted to an image of a table, quite pretty to look at, but useless for sharing data.
If, however, I paste the same cells into Word and then copy them again, I end up with a proper HTML table embedded in my email. Neither is superior to the other, and for some purposes the image would be better, while for others the HTML table is better.