Anyone who usually works, on a regular basis, with Microsoft Word, surely you will immediately recognize this sequence:
- Ctrl+V
- Ctrl+Z
- Right click
- paste options
- Paste text only
This may seem silly, but the truth is that in the end, in many cases, it is a distraction that, especially if you’re in a particularly productive state of mind, it can cut it off, which in addition to having an immediate impact on your work rate, can (and usually is) extremely frustrating. And yes, I repeat, I wish this was humanity’s biggest problem, but the truth is that it is a problem that could have a simple solution, but that until now has resisted.
The reason for this is that, when you copy a text to the Windows clipboard, not only its content is stored in memory, so does the format in which he was. Font, bold and italics, size, effects… everything associated with the way in which the text is presented is temporarily stored together with the text itself. Therefore, when you have copied text from a source in which it had a certain format, for example a web page, and paste it into a Word document using the classic keyboard shortcut Control + V, what will arrive at your Word document text is the complete package.
This, sometimes, may not be a problem. However, what is common when we work on a Word document is that we have a preference for using particular formats, whether they are the default ones from the Microsoft word processor or, and in this case with even greater reason, those that we have previously defined so that the final result adjusts to our preferences.
Microsoft Word is a productivity application, so it can be expected that it provides the most suitable environment to enhance precisely that, productivity. Thus, it seems that the people of Redmond have decided to settle this historical debt (okay, maybe I’m going a bit too far, but personally I think it’s an essential advance), bringing to Microsoft Word for Windows and Mac a keyboard shortcut that, in reality , It has been present for some time in other applications and services of the companyas in Microsoft Teams or in the web version of the word processor itself.
Thus, and according to what we can read in Windows Central, Microsoft is already testing a keyboard shortcut to paste plain text in Word for Windows and for macOS. And most likely, it will not be a particularly new key combination for you, since we have already seen it in various applications and services. It is Control + Shift + V in Windows, while to use it in Word for Mac we will have to press Command + Shift + V.
The Paste Plain Text keyboard shortcut is currently only available to members of the Microsoft 365 Insider Program, as it is being tested in the Beta channel of the program. However, and since it is a shortcut that can almost be considered standardized, it can be expected that don’t take too long to make the leap to the final version of Word.
