Tired of Pasted Text Messing Up Your Formatting? Try This

You paste text into a document and for some dumb reason the formatting comes with. Gah! Here’s how to stop that.

Pasting text without formatting is possible on both Windows and macOS, assuming you know the correct keyboard shortcuts—typically Ctrl-Shift-V on Windows and Command-Option-V on macOS.

Ally MacDonald, on Twitter, points out a simple way Mac users can make pasting without formatting the default:

Want to improve your quality of life in 5 seconds?

1. Go to System Preferences
2. Keyboard
3. App Shortcuts
4. All Applications –> add "Paste and Match Style" ⌘V

Done.

— Ally MacDonald (@allymacdonald) August 1, 2018

This change re-maps the default “Paste” keyboard shortcut to paste and match style, which should probably be the default anyway. We’ve shown you how to customize your macOS keyboard shortcuts if you need more help.

But what are Windows users supposed to do? The simplest thing is to download Puretext, a tiny Windows app we wrote about a decade ago (yeah, we’re getting old.) This app will make pasting without formatting the default every time you use Ctrl-V, so you will never have to look at a mess of formatting ever again.

And that’s it! You’ll never paste a swamp of unwanted formatting into your documents ever again. Enjoy!