If you write and edit articles and blog posts using MS Word, you might have to copy some text to Word when you are doing research. When you do so, you will have to deal with a lot of fancy formatting and images that get in to your clipboard when paste the text to MS Word. Most of the times, you will copy heading, font style, links, images and all sort of annoyance. Some of you smart ones out there, would have found a work around for this issue by pasting the copied text in to an application like notepad and then again copying it and pasting it to your MS Word. One other way is to copy text and after pasting the text in MS word you will get ‘Paste Options.’ Here you will be able to choose ‘Keep Text Only’ to strip all the junk in the text.
The notepad workaround worked, but soon I realized that I am wasting an awful lot of time. I searched around and found a technique to directly past text without any kind of formatting with the help of MS Word Macros.
Goal: Here will to try to accomplish the task of pasting text to MS Word copied from anywhere as plain text. Usually in a browser, to paste plain text, you can use the keyboard short-cut CTRL+SHIFT+V. This works on almost all the browsers out there.
Create Macro In MS Word To Paste Plain Text
1. Open MS Word
2. Click on Tools and Choose ‘Macro.’ This will open the Macros settings dialog box. If you can’t find the menu option, press Alt+F8, this will also open the dialog box.
3. In the ‘Macro in’ option make sure ‘All active templates and documents’ option is chosen. In the Macro name field type in ‘PasteUnformattedText.’
4. Now click on create, this will open MS Visual Basics editor. In the editor paste the following, before “End Sub”
Selection.PasteSpecial DataType:=wdPasteText
Now it will look something like this,
Sub PasteSpecial()
Selection.PasteSpecial DataType:=wdPasteText
End Sub
Do check the image below.
5. Now in Microsoft Visual Basic, click on ‘File’ and click ‘Close and Return to MS Word.’
This closes the Visual Basic Window.
The Macro is set and ready to be used. Now you will have to instruct MS Word that the text in clipboard needs to be pasted with no formatting whenever you press a key combination.
Creating Keyboard Short-cut For the Macro
We will take the unformatted text pasting short cut as CTRL+SHIFT+V, which is the standard keyboard shortcut to past clean unformatted text in browsers.
We need to configure MS Word such that, whenever you press the key combination CTRL+SHIFT+V, the text in your clipboard (whatever you copied using CTRL+C or right-click copy). You can also choose any other keyboard short-cut of your choice.
Irrespective of the version of MS Office you are using, you can easily find the options and settings to create keyboard shortcut for the Macro we created earlier.
1. Click the Tools menu and click on Cutomize, sometime you might have to click on expand to see more options.
2. In the dialog box click on “Keyboard” button. Make sure that the ‘Save changes in’ drop-down is set to ‘Normal.’
3. Click ‘Macros’ in the categories list and in the list of Macros on the right click on PasteUnformattedText, which is the name of the Macro we created earlier.
4. You need to register the keys combination. Press CTRL+SHIFT+V on your keyboard you will see the combination you have entered. Click on Assign and close both the dialog boxes that are open.
That is all. Whenever you copy something from your browser (or from anywhere) and paste it into MS Word using the shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+V, only the unformatted plain text will be pasted.
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