By default, Microsoft Word tries to preserve styles for text copied from a source outside of Word. If you don’t want to manually delete style information after pasting text in Word, there is a way to force Word to insert text from an external source without default formatting.
In this example, we have copied text from an article on the Help Desk Geek website. Select the text, right-click it and choose Copy from the pop-up menu.
When we pasted the text into Word, the article formatting was preserved.
Paste a word as text only
To paste text only when copying from an external source, select Options on the File tab.
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In the Word Options dialog box, click the Advanced button in the left pane.
Scroll down to the Cut, copy and paste section. Select “Keep Text Only” from the drop-down list to paste from other programs. You can change them all if you like, as I did, but the defaults should work for most people.
Click OK to accept your changes and close the Word Options dialog box.
Copy the text from the external source again and paste it into Word. Text is inserted without formatting.
NOTE. These settings will not affect text already copied to the clipboard. After changing these settings, you need to copy the desired text again before pasting it into Word. So now you no longer need to first copy everything to Notepad before copying from there to Word. Enjoy!
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