Windows PowerToys is a fantastic set of utilities for Windows, and it just got better with the addition of “Paste as Plain Text”. Just like the mouse pointer locator I blogged about before, it is a small thing that you get used to and immediately notice if it is absent.
Paste as Plain Text does exactly what it says. It takes whatever text with formatting is on the clipboard, and pastes it without the formatting.
Why is this Useful?
To me, this is indispensable. It feels like more and more programs and web applications have added support for formatted text over the years. When that works, it can be quite nice – like copying a piece of syntax-highlighted text out of Visual Studio Code and pasting it into a PowerPoint and getting something that looks like the editor view with colors and styling.
But when it does not work right, it is a total time-sink to try to patch things up. For some reason, I very often move text between programs and web applications where formatting just gets messed up.
For example, copying from Microsoft OneNote and trying to paste into a Sharepoint Site Page is a horrible experience if the formatting comes along. It just gets all wrong. OneNote also has a tendency to put both images and text on the clipboard, and some brilliant receiving program decides to use the image… which is almost never the right answer. Some web pages with “WYSIWYG” editors have a really hard time getting rid of bad formatting, and pasting text without formatting can really save time. If you have started to write a code-formatted block on page and paste formatted text in (due to copying it from some source that is not just entirely plain text), it gets destroyed.
Pasting the text as just plain text resolves all these issues – it is the same as just typing the characters by hand. Which is always the right thing to do.
In the past, I often solved this by pasting misbehaving text into an Emacs buffer and then copying the text from there. In some programs like Word and Excel that have a “Paste Special” menu, doing paste-as-plain was a pretty common maneuver, but one that required a bit of effort (or program-specific shortcuts).
Being able to do Command-Control-V instead everywhere is just so much more convenient.
Recommended.