The quick and simple way to paste plain text

"If you want something done right, do it yourself."

"Why reinvent the wheel?"

That sums up a conversation I had with a coworker after I told him about the macro I created in Microsoft Word that converts my Ctrl-V keyboard shortcut into one that pastes text from a Web site, some other app, or elsewhere, minus the formatting, images, and any other nontext stuff. The fact is, I rarely want to paste anything but the text, and I want it in the format of the file it's being added to, not the format of the source.

I thought this handy-dandy trick was a first-rate time-saver, especially when you consider that for those rare instances when I want to preserve the formatting of the source, or to include elements other than text, I simply press Shift-Insert.

My buddy said he could do me one better: He presses the Windows key and V to paste plain text he has copied from just about anywhere, into just about any application, not just Word. And he didn't have to go through a multistep process to create a Word macro. All he did was download Steve Miller's free PureText utility.

The PureText freebie from Steve Miller makes pasting plain text a breeze.

After you download the program, it puts an icon in your system tray. Then you just copy the text you want, click the icon before you press Windows-V to paste it without the formatting, or anything else except the text. You can choose another key combination as long as one of the keys is either the Shift, Ctrl, or the Windows key, but I stick with the default keys because they avoid conflicts with other shortcuts. Speaking of which....

Tomorrow: I'll give you a list of the most useful keyboard shortcuts you probably don't know about.

[voidphoenix]

If your macro solution doesn't require clicking an icon in the system tray before pasting, I think it's much better than this utility. Less mouse == more productivity. :)

[babydinosaur]

If you stick with the default Windows-V combo there's no need for that icon click at all.

[doreilly]

That's a good point. I'll describe the macro approach next week.