The Minority Report

This was seriously starting to be a real irritant to me and I imagine others as well. Trying to paste just plain ol’ text into any application, not just Microsoft Word.

Pasting text from web pages into Microsoft Word can be a serious pain—all you wanted was the text, but it copies the formatting. Reader Wille writes in with a quick tip to make it simpler.

The official method for pasting plain text into Word is the Paste Special option, assigned to the Ctrl+Shift+V hotkey combination, but it opens a dialog and forces you to choose to paste plain text—a tedious irritation after using it repeatedly. Wille’s method is to create a simple macro that pastes using unformatted text, and assign the same hotkey—a simple way to save time pasting text.
Lifehacker – Create a Hotkey to Paste Plain Text in Microsoft Word – Microsoft Word

I’m going to do Lifehacker one better, even though they covered it on August, 2009:

Windows only: Free system tray utility PureText adds a global keyboard shortcut to your system to paste text into any application without formatting.
Lifehacker – PureText Strips Formatting from Your Clipboard When You Paste – Windows

Download and use Puretext.
It puts a simple icon in your taskbar.

On my system, it uses about 6MB of RAM (which I think is a lot but I’m old school…new school that is nothing).  It just sits in your tray and I have it bound to the Windows-V key although you can map it to whatever key you want to use.

What PureText Will and Will Not Do

PureText only removes rich formatting from text. This includes the font face, font style (bold, italics, etc.), font color, paragraph styles (left/right/center aligned), margins, character spacing, bullets, subscript, superscript, tables, charts, pictures, embedded objects, etc. However, it does not modify the actual text. It will not remove or fix new-lines, carriage returns, tabs, or other white-space. It will not fix word-wrap or clean up your paragraphs. If you copy the source code of a web page to the clipboard, it is not going to remove all the HTML tags. If you copy text from an actual web page (not the source of the page), it will remove the formatting.

PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY. The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically.
PureText Home Page

It is a freaking godsend, go download it.