I have a thing about stamping out minor annoyances in life. In my top ten is the default paste behavior in Word and other Office applications that preserves the original formatting. This is almost never the right behavior since I like to manage the styles in my documents to a minimum number and make heavy use of Outline View. When pasting from other documents or web pages, I don’t want a bunch of custom formating that I have to change for consistency and then delete the styles. Word provides a cumbersome Paste Special option for this, but does have a slightly more convenient context sensitive version shown below:

The problem with this is that it means taking your hands of the keyboard to use the mouse. The best solution I’ve found to do this efficiently without using the mouse is a tiny application called Pure Text. It runs in the background and responds to the hotkey combination Windows + V as by pasting the clipboard into the current document as text only. This means that the text will have whatever style you currently have selected. It’s a great little helper application, and although it saves only a few seconds each time, this adds up and most importantly it completely eliminates this minor annoyance from your life!

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 8th, 2009 at 7:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.