Microsoft aims for a stickier paste

In Office 2010, Microsoft is hoping to cut down on the need for the undo button by introducing the ability to preview different paste options before committing to one.

(Credit: Microsoft)

It stands to reason that one of the most common tasks users do in Office is copy and paste something into a document. In fact, Microsoft says about 20 percent of Office command clicks are either copy or paste.

But, it also turns out that one of the most common things users do after pasting something is to hit the "undo" button after finding out that they didn't get what they were looking for.

"You shouldn't have to do that," said Microsoft group product manager Chris Bryant. "We should give you better tools."

With Office 2010, Microsoft is introducing a paste preview command that lets a user see what the different paste options will look like before having to commit.

Today, the software maker provides a number of different paste options, such as including text with all the HTML formatting intact or just pasting the unformatted text. Users can even change the default to be whichever option they think they prefer the most. The problem is that there is no one option that is universally preferred and even the same user wants one format one time and a different option the next.

Microsoft is hoping the paste preview option will help solve that problem. It is also counting on that that and other new features will add up to make Office 2010 a compelling upgrade even though it is not the major overhaul seen with the last release, Office 2007. Microsoft is making an invitation-only technical preview of the software available on Monday, with a broader beta release planned for later in the year, to be followed by a final version in the first half of 2010.

"If you look at the number of times people cut and paste and then undo, it's remarkable," Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop said in an interview last week. "Personally I'm a victim of that, as well."

Elop said that paste preview is changing his muscle memory away from his pattern of "paste, oops, undo."

[jaguar717]

Ctrl-C Ctrl-V Ctrl-Z <arrow arrow arrow> Ctrl-V is probably still faster for those of us used to the basic keyboard commands.

A smarter way of handling "Paste Special" in Excel would be very useful, however. I "paste text" every day and the extra right click, click, enter is nowhere near as fast.

[Nataku4ca]

i agree with u but some of the regular users... or may be i should say alot of them, dont know how to use hot keys or they know but like using mouse better...

i can see the reasoning behind it too, so it's better to have multiple ways to do things and at least they are trying to improve things.

[paulej]

And Ctrl-Alt-V in Office 2007 allows quick access to "Paste Special". I'll confess I cannot remember all of the shotcuts in Office, but the most common ones like copy and paste, I certainly can... they've been around for years and years. That said, I still people challenged with a decision between single and double clicks.

[jaguar717]

I'm always looking for more useful shortcuts, as even after lots of daily use and 4 years of living in Excel for my degrees I'm sure I've covered less than 10% of its potential.

Ctrl-Alt-V did nothing though. The first letter shortcuts like under File, Edit, etc also work with the "context menu" (right click button by right control), so you can right-click-button + S, but that's clumsy.

[saintseminole]

Copy options would be more useful to me than paste options. For instance I've added commands to my Firefox context menu: "copy as plain text" and "copy as html" in addition to the straight-up copy choice. If I had that in Word, it would be great. When I'm ready to paste, I don't want the option then.

But many people have already solved this conundrum with clipboard managers like Ditto and others.

[aMUSICsite]

I do hope that Paste without nasty MS formatting is a default past option.

[bowlie1]

My goodness, a sledgehammer to kill a fly. Change the default to "Paste Special --> text" voila! Or at least let the user choose which version of Paste they want as a default.

I always want paste special - which doesn't exist in Outlook HTML documents. Why?

[CTO_Dude]

The point is that you can preview all of the options (Paste as plain text, Rich Text, HTML, etc) without having to commit anything. It's not a huge time saver but it clearly allows you to not have to keep performing trial by error tasks.

[Inconnux]

it's not as if hitting undo is difficult...

[Vegaman_Dan]

I would be happy if it did this OS system wide, as well as give you an option for several clipboards at once. Too often I have copied text into the clipboard and then before pasting it, inadvertantly or mistakenly copied something else in the mean time.

[CTO_Dude]

The problem is that all programs dont recognize paste preview. The intelligence of previewing is a part of the app... not the OS.

[Seaspray0]

I second the multiple clipboard.

[ThePrairiePrankster]

So is this what will cause people to spend $300 for an upgrade? I know people still on Office 97 and 2000...they seem happy. I have 2007 and have no need to spend more money just to have paste preview...sounds like a desperate attempt to pull money out of people's pockets...good luck with that.

[jessiethe3rd]

Good lord man - it's a simple feature - there are plenty of other things out there as far as differences between O27k and O2010. Office 97 and 2000? Outlook changes alone are enough to make one upgrade not to even state difference in the UI which after working with for 20 minutes have saved me quite a bit of time doing common tasks like changing fonts, etc.

[retroboy77]

" Users can even change the default to be whichever option they think they prefer the most."
AWESOME. This will save me hours of going paste special, unformatted (or Values in Excel).