Paste Plain Text in Microsoft Office

November 14, 2008 · Filed Under Keyboard Shortcuts, Microsoft Office, Tips 

Paste Special When you copy text from a web page and paste it in an email message or Word document, you end up pasting the fonts, formatting and styles along with the text.  But sometimes all you want is the plain text. 

One option is to select "Paste Special" from the "Edit" menu or Office 2007 ribbon bar. 

Another option is to use the Ctrl+Space keyboard shortcut available in Microsoft Office programs like Word, Excel and Outlook. 

Here’s how it works:

  1. Select and copy text in any program (typically using Ctrl+C).
  2. Paste the text into any Microsoft Office program (Ctrl+V).
  3. Select the text you just pasted.
  4. Press Ctrl+Space.  The formatted text is converted to plain text.

Note that the Ctrl+Space keyboard shortcut clears the formatting from any text in a Microsoft Office program, not just pasted text.

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One Response to “Paste Plain Text in Microsoft Office”

  1. Roman Hammes on September 3rd, 2009 8:27 am

    I’ve found that doesn’t work in our corporate environment when pasting from the web to Word (have not bothered to check this in Excel).
    A workaround I came up with was to create a macro with a simple
    Selection.PasteAndFormat wdFormatPlainText
    and map that to the keyboard CTRL + ALT + V (which overwrites the paste special mapping, feel free to use whatever makes sense to you).

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