How to paste raw text?

Question

Windows copies and pastes Rich Text. I want it to copy and paste only raw text. Is there any way to change this behaviour globally?

Someone in another thread suggested to use AutoHotKey tho change this, but I don't think this will work with my current clipboard manager YC3

Answer 1

As Shiki suggested the following steps do the trick:

1. Win+R

2. Ctrl+V

3. Ctrl+A

4. Ctrl+C

Answer 2

Have a look at PureText.

Answer 3

An alternative method for quickly reformatting text would be to paste the rich text; copy-format (SHIFT+CTRL+C) from any of the raw text you may have, and then paste-format (SHIFT+CTRL+V) over the rich text. This works throughout Office, YMMV outside of that.

Also, [CTRL+ALT+V] is the keyboard shortcut for Special Paste which will allow you various paste options depending on the Office program; including pasting all of the text as unicode, RTF, unformatted, and HTML in Word. This is subject to the User Settings you have for pasting actions (these were set up when the copy of Office was initialized, i.e. "Paste text as original format/new style").

Answer 4

In windows (mine is Win8) Try Menu key+ C

You can find Menu key in this Wiki article.

Answer 5

Assuming the clipboard manager still uses the standard windows clipboard (I have yet to see one that doesn't, though I've never used YC3), the autohotkey solution should work as normal - if your clipboard manager is overriding the windows clipboard entirely and doesn't supply an API, no other application can grab its clipboard data, so unless YC3 implements raw text pasting you're a bit stuck on the direct automation front - though you could always use AutoHotKey to automate Shiki's method of pasting it into a text field that doesn't accept rich text, and then copying it back out again.

Answer 6

For Office Word 2007 and newer versions, in the "Advanced Options", in the section "Cut, Copy and Paste", there are 4 dropboxes where you can set value to always keep the base text style when pasting, depending from where your copy comes from.

Answer 7

Unearthing this question because it is a common enough question and most people still don't know how to do it.

Paste unformatted

• In many apps and web apps (including for instance Google Docs), Ctrl+Shift+V pastes without formatting, which is very convenient.
• This does not work within the Office Suite. Instead, you can as @msg said (e.g. in Word) use paste special by pressing Ctrl+Alt+V — or Alt, E, S if you prefer old school shortcuts! — then selecting Unformatted Unicode Text (you can navigate the interface with the Arrow keys then validate your choice with Enter.

Windows Clipboard History

With Windows 10, I found little need for a dedicated clipboard manager anymore because there is a built-in Clipboard History which works very well (for formatted text and images).

It first needs to be activated :

• Open Windows Settings by pressing Win + i
• Go to System → Clipboard
• Under Clipboard history, switch the toggle button to ON.

Then you use it by pressing Win + V: this displays your clipboard history; you can browse it with the arrow keys and pick the one you want to paste with Enter.

However, I did not find a way to paste raw data from my clipboard history and still have to use Notepad for this.