Comment by red_admiral
5 hours ago
Once upon a time, you could strip formatting from the clipboard in notepad with ^V ^A ^C, for example if you were trying to paste from edge into word. There's still a market for a non-rich text editor, without autosave, cloud, account login or AI.
Apparently pasting unformatted text in browsers can be done with Ctrl+Shift+V. Pasting it in Office is Ctrl+Alt+V. Always the odd one out. Taken from here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220906-00/?p=10...
It doesn't work everywhere though as there are still apps that don't offer a plain text paste, and as you have noted the shortcut can be different in different applications.
I've been using this AutoHotKey script long enough that Ctrl+Shift+V has become a muscle memory for "paste without formatting". In case it's useful to anyone else, put this in a file (clipboard.ahk) and run it at startup:
That way, it works globally, it's not dependent on any particular application implementing it.
Notepad in Windows 11 (while not autosave) will preserve unsaved documents.
Unless it changed recently, the faster way is to just press ctrl+shift+V for "paste special" in Word, which should open up the paste dialog with "Unformated Text" preselected (IIRC), so immediately pressing Enter should close the dialog and paste the stripped text.
Careful when doing it in Teams. ctrl+shift+V is "paste without formatting", ctrl+shift+C is "call everyone".
Hey everyone! Check me out! I don't preserve formatting!
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I sincerely hope that whoever decided that a) this action needs a shortcut and b) to overload the most common hotkey spends the rest of eternity toiling away at features nobody wants, slowly ruining their company, and never, ever gets that sick promotion they're desperately chasing. I hope their wife leaves them and takes the dog.