I’m tired of hitting Alt-E, S, CursorDown, Enter all the fscking, dang, golly gee time (that’s the quickest way to do a Paste Special, Plain Text) in Windows that I could think of.
Is there any way to make standard Windows (XP in my case) always paste plain text instead of stupid styled text? Universally, that is, not on a program by program basis, 'cos sometimes there’s no way to change keymapping.
If you’re a menu user, you have no idea what I’m talking about – I want Ctrl-V to paste plain text, plain and simple. Universally.
To make this behavior universal, it seems to me that you’d have to have a program monitoring the Windows clipboard and reformatting all its formatted-text styles as plain text. This isn’t hard to write (it’s easy in Perl with Win32::Clipboard). Most of the clipboard enhancers don’t seem to do this automatically, though. But it looks like HovText does (I haven’t used it), based on its description at this page.
I’m on a Mac, not Windows, but see what happens if you Shift-Control-V instead of just Control-V. Try also Control-Alt-V and other variations. In many Mac programs that let you paste formatted text, adding the Shift key (e.g., Eudora) or sometimes Option and Shift (e.g., TextEdit) lets you paste unformatted text instead.
The thing is it’s not just Word – it’s Excel, and PowerPoint, and Outlook, and virtually everything on the platform.
Thanks for the links – I’ll see what works. And I’ll do the WishList thing. Although, we gotta keep that link secret – once the general public finds out, it’ll be like a DoS attack on Microsoft!
I agree, that’s the most useful combination most of the time when you paste something that doesn’t come from another Word document, and even then …
You can achieve this, for MS Word anyway, by doing the following:
Go to Tools - Macro - Macros
Type ‘pasteplain’ in the top textbox
Click on ‘Create’
Paste the following lines from this window into your Macro window (from Selection up to but not including End Sub):
Sub pasteplain()
'
' pasteplain Macro
' Macro recorded 4/6/2005 by ...
'
Selection.PasteSpecial Link:=False, DataType:=wdPasteText, Placement:= _
wdInLine, DisplayAsIcon:=False
End Sub
And then assign the CTRL-SHIFT-V keycombo to it in the keyboard assignment window:
Rightclick the toolbar - customize - options - keyboard - Macros - ‘pasteplain’
Go to the ‘Press new shortcut keys’ textbox and press CTRL-SHIFT-V.
If you have any questions about this, feel free to ask.
Hmm, this would be a handy feature. Not knowing much about macros, should this be in Normal.dot or what? I wouldn’t want macros in all of my documents.
In Word2003, Ctrl+Shift+V is “Paste Formatting,” and is mirrored in “Ctrl+Shift+C” which is copy formatting. Find a portion of the document formatted the way you want, Ctrl+Shift+C, highlight the portion you want formatted similarly, Ctrl+Shift+V. Not a feature I use, but it is already assigned, so there might be some conflict…?
Yeah, the normal.dot is the place to have this. Or alternatively, you can store it in a document that you save as a word template, and then place that into the WRDSTRT folder, as indicated in the File Locations tab of Tools - Options. Those templates are always included.
But does this mean that every document I create will have that macro with it everywhere it goes, or only that when a document is open on my machine that function will be available to me?