1. For Word - Default Paste Text Only App
2. For Word - Default Paste Text Only App
3. For Word - Default Paste Text Only Document

Go to File Options. Then, click Advanced in the left pane on the Word Options dialog box. In the Cut, copy, and paste section, uncheck the Show Paste Options button when content is pasted box. Word Paste as Text Only. To paste the text only when copied from an outside source, select Options from the File tab. On the Word Options dialog box, click the Advanced button in the left pane. Scroll down to the Cut, copy, and paste section. Select Keep Text Only from the drop-down list for Pasting from other programs. In the Editor Options dialog box, click Advanced in the left bar, then go to the Cut, copy, and paste section, select Keep Text Only in the Pasting from other programs drop-down list. Finally click the OK button. When it returns to the Outlook Options dialog box, click the OK button. From now on, when you pasting contents from other programs. In Word 2010 (and 2007 I think), you can set the default paste option. In Word 2010, on the Home tab click the drop-down arrow below the large Paste icon. Select Set Default Paste, then select the default paste option for various types of pasting (e.g. Within the same document, between documents etc.) –Rhonda. Paste Special will be remembered by old Word hands because it was the place to go for some features – in particular ‘unformatted text’ that have been replaced by more direct Paste options. Where Paste Special is handy is with the ‘Paste Link’ option.

These two macros will save you a lot of time. You will used them every time when you need to copy something from external source (like Internet page) into a Word or Excel document, but you do not need all the colors and formatting. You just need the text.

Normally, you would do this with Paste Special, but this is several awkward clicks and many seconds lost. Over the course of the day this is a huge inefficiency.

Let’s write a macro for Word first. As of 2012-01-11 WED, I adopted this little macro as final version:

This macro was tested with Word 2007, and it can handle paste from Web and from Visuals Studio. First statement (Selection.PasteSpecial) handles rich text formats, and second statement (Selection.PasteAndFormat) deals with pasting Unicode strings.

This is a very simple macro. It works in all Word versions, including Office 2010. It works multiple times, so you can paste the same string over and over again. Who can suggest a better way of doing this without using dreaded “GoTo” statements?

Regular paste is Ctrl+V. I recommend to map this macro to Alt+V key combination.

To map your new macro to a keyboard combination in Word 2007 do these simple 10 (Ten!) steps:

Now let’s proceed to Excel. In Excel open visual basic (Alt+F11) and paste this code into one of the PERSONAL.XLS modules:

As you can see in Excel, it is a little more work. The problem here is that that there are two possible scenarios. One is Copy and Paste Special inside Excel, and the other is Copy and Paste Text from outside the Excel. And this macro should handle both scenarios.

We are suggesting to use Shift+Ctrl+V combination for this macro. To assigns a keyboard shortcut to a macro in Excel, use this four steps:

Moment of truth. Now you can start shaving precious seconds, when you copy formatted text from outside sources into your Word or Excel documents.

2016-02-13 SAT – Updated after series of comments from Chuck >:

Of course, you need to place your macro inside PERSONAL.XLSB file for all instances of Excel to have access to this functionality.

Come on. It is copying and pasting. How hard can this be, really? Well, honestly, quite hard and time consuming even for pros and power-users of Office. Is this a design flaw, a user error, or is copying and pasting really just a more difficult thing than we realize? Who knows? I do I do! It’s all of the above!

Earlier today, one of the designers at Pluralsight (a brilliant and talented designer, by the way, skilled across a wide variety of tools and platforms) had trouble copying and pasting some text into a PowerPoint text box, and asked me for some help. But we before we dive into the specifics about his copy and paste situation, you need to understand how PowerPoint’s default text boxes behave, formatting-wise.

Every presentation template in PowerPoint, even the “blank” presentation template, has a pre-formatted text box associated with that template or theme. I’m not going to get too technical with this, but every time you add a new text box to PowerPoint, PowerPoint will draw that text box according to those design specifications saved with that theme. Yes, you can change how the default text box is formatted per presentation or per template! Just draw a text box, format it as you would like it to appear, then right-click on the text box, and choose the option, “Set as the Default Text Box.” Now, every time you draw a new text box, the new formatting options will be the default.

Pasting into a Text Box

Now that we understand where those formatting options come from for a text box, now understand that every time you paste text into a text box (not a placeholder…that is different) PowerPoint, by default, will reformat the pasted text to look like whatever text should look like according to the default theme rather than the default text box. So, if you are copying and pasting between different PowerPoint presentations, yes, the text will update to reflect and respect the design of the destination template or theme. If you find this confusing, that’s because it is. If you think it’s a little stupid, well yeah, it is a little bit!

Simply put, our designer was prettying up some slides in PowerPoint and wanted to copy text from one PowerPoint text box in one presentation and paste them into his own new presentation, in a text box that he had created and reformatted a bit (I believe he changed the font size and style). The problem was that when he pasted the text into the new presentation’s text box, the text did not look the way he wanted it to look. The text did not look like the text he had just written and formatted, nor did it look like the text from the original PowerPoint deck. He was confused and naturally frustrated by this.

The next natural thing my designer friend did was try and adjust the paste options. And if you have ever pasted anything in PowerPoint or other Office program, you might have noticed this: The Paste Options button.

That little clipboard popup is your friend, trust me. If you click on that button or press the Ctrl key, you will see all options related to the content you’ve pasted. My designer friend switched back and forth between the first two choices: “Use Destination Theme”, and “Keep Source Formatting” neither of which gave him exactly what he had wanted. The other options he didn’t even bother to try. “Paste as Picture,” clearly didn’t seem like something he would want to do. And then the last option “Keep Text Only” didn’t seem right either. He therefore assumed what he wanted didn’t exist, and then asked me if I knew of a workaround.

For Word - Default Paste Text Only App

What my designer friend didn’t realize is that the solution was staring him in the face under a really bad name, “Keep Text Only.” Granted, I can’t fault Microsoft for this as I can’t think of better short title for what this option does either (“Leave it alone, biatch”?). So here are the paste options for pasting text into a text box:

Use Destination Theme

This option will change how your text looks to match how text should look according to your default destination’s theme (just as the title suggests)–not your default text box. This option, most people don’t have too much trouble with, unless they’ve already gone through and changed how the text box was formatted and then tried to paste text into the text box after the fact.

Keep Source Formatting

This option keeps text looking the way it did from the original PowerPoint slide that you are copying from (again, just as the title suggests). This is the least frustrating of options to choose from. This options works just as you would expect it to. Yay!

Picture

This option does not always appear, depending on what it is you are copying and pasting. But, if you are pasting text that can be pasted as a picture, PowerPoint will convert the text to a picture (png, I believe) that looks exactly like the text from the source file. The thing is, it’s a picture. So the text itself cannot be edited as text, but it can be edited just like any old picture. The frustration I have with this option is that PowerPoint seems to slap this picture into the center of the slide, not where you had your text box. Oh well. Pictures are easy to move.

Keep Text Only

For Word - Default Paste Text Only App

With this option, you are pasting text and ignoring the template or destination theme options AND any formatting that the original file contained. So, if you’ve gone through and reformatted text inside your text box or set your default text box to something very different from your presentation’s theme, then this is the option you will want to choose most often.

For Word - Default Paste Text Only Document

To demonstrate this and the other paste options, check out the animated gif below: