Hands on: Cut and paste in Word

One of my pet annoyances in Word is that pasting text automatically defaults to preserving its source formatting. This isn’t so bad if you are copying within a document, or between your own documents which use the same styles, but it becomes an irritation when you are pasting text from an email or stealing chunks of text from a web page for your school homework.

If you use Word XP or 2003, then you have the Paste Options button that pops up next to pasted text. Click on this, and you will have options to Keep Source Formatting (the default), Match Destination Formatting or Keep Text Only. This is for normal text – you may be offered other options within numbered lists.

There’s a subtle difference between the last two options. In general, when pasting from and to a Word document, Match Destination Formatting will cause the pasted text to assume the paragraph style of the surrounding paragraph, but keep any character formatting, such as bold or italic. Keep Text Only strips all character formatting, as well as hyperlinks.

In general, copying and pasting within the same document is painless, but there are a few things to watch. If you copy a paragraph marker with the preceding text, then you will copy the paragraph formatting. By default, Word does this automatically.

If you turn on paragraph marks from Tools, Options, you’ll see that as you select a paragraph the selection jumps to capture the paragraph mark – if you turn the option off (Tools, Options, Edit – Use Smart Paragraph Selection) then you have to select the paragraph mark deliberately.

However, our experiments found that if you paste a paragraph (with its mark) into another paragraph, a new paragraph isn’t created and the destination formatting is retained. Similarly, if you copy a section break, the pasted result will assume formatting, such as page layout, from the source.

Pasting from an external source – particularly HTML – brings a range of new challenges. Usually, but not always, the pasted text will assume the font of the surrounding text, but retain things such as emphasis, indents and spacing.

If you paste several headings and paragraphs, you’ll (sometimes) get a fourth option in the Paste Options button, ‘Use Destination Styles’. By choosing this Word will try to assign styles existing in the document or template to the pasted text.

Many people find the Paste Options button distracting and awkward to use. Although it stays in place until you start typing again, so that you can try different options to see how they look, you may already know exactly what you want. You can turn the button off from Tools, Options, Edit.

Note that this affects other Office applications, so you won’t get it in Outlook or Excel, where it may be more useful.

Whether the button is on or not, you can still use the Paste Special command to choose how you want text pasted: and if you are running Word 2000 or earlier this is the only way. However, it’s tiresome to go to Edit, Paste Special to make your choice. To paste ‘As plain text’ directly, you need to create a macro. You can do this by recording the actions of Edit, Paste Special, Unformatted Text or for simpler, cleaner code use this:

Sub Pastetext()
Selection.PasteSpecialDataType:=wdPasteText
End Sub

You can assign the macro to a toolbar button or, more usefully, the right-click menu. For the latter, go to Tools, Customize and turn to the Toolbars Tab. Tick ‘Shortcut Menus’ and a block of three menus – Text, Table and Draw. Open the Text menu then the Text item. This will produce the standard text right-click menu, which will remain open when you take the mouse off it.

Now go to the Commands tab in the customise dialogue, and select Macros from the left-hand list. From the right-hand pane drag your macro onto a suitable po sition on the open menu. Once in position you’ll find it has a less-than-friendly name, such as Normal.NewMacros.Pastetext. Right-click on it and you’ll be able to rename it to something snappier.

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