Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Paste Special Unformatted Text At Your Fingertips

This one is a pet peeves of Paul, I admit that sometime Rich Text is really a good thing. In our world of Windows Rich Text, there are times when I want to paste rich text and many more times I want to paste Text-only. My wife actually influenced me into realizing the need is great enough to research it. I've used the Paste Special command for a long time, but have been troubled by the lack of a short-cut key to it.

This article (link below) is a great howto create a macro to a shortcut key for MS Word. Which these days (Office 2003) translates directly to our Outlook 2003 Email Client. If you create this macro in Word, you can use it in composing your Outlook emails.

Paste Special Unformatted Text At Your Fingertips

The next extension would be to create a Windows wide Paste Special shortcut key. Sure, I'll add it to my project list ;)

Update: I won't yet bother with the Windows Wide implementation. It is done:
PureText - http://stevemiller.net/PureText/, a quick trial seems to suggest it works well.

A quote from the web-page:
Have you ever copied some text from a web page or a document and then wanted to paste it as simple text into another application without getting all the formatting from the original source? PureText makes this simple by adding a new Windows hot-key (default is WINDOWS+V) that allows you to paste text to any application without formatting.

After running PureText.exe, you will see a "PT" tray icon appear near the clock on your task bar. You can click on this icon to remove formatting from the text that is currently on the clipboard. You can right-click on the icon to display a menu with more options.



Keywords: Paste Special keyboard shortcut, paste special, paste unformatted text, paste unformatted text shortcut key, unformatted text paste, unformatted paste, Windows, Word, Outlook, Windows Wide unformatted paste.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Does this really work? That would be truly awesome. Even copy and paste special unformatted text works inconsistently...

Paul Cooley said...

Yes, this works for me and several others. I've not bumped into a problem.

Joel Pearson said...

Is there an equivalent like this command for linux/ubuntu?