September 6th, 2022
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Commonly-supported Windows shortcuts for pasting without formatting

Raymond Chen

Sometimes you just want to paste as plain text.

Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox all support Ctrl+Shift+V as a keyboard shortcut for “paste as plain text.” This means that Ctrl+Shift+V also works in browser-based apps, like Teams.

Programs in the Microsoft Office suite naturally do things a little differently, and the way to paste as plain text is to hit Ctrl+Alt+V and then select “Unformatted Text”. Alternatively, you can do Alt, H, V, T. Note that the keys are pressed and released in sequence, not held simultaneously.

One trick I use if I need to strip formatting from the clipboard is to use the key sequence Win+R, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Esc. This opens the Run dialog, pastes the clipboard into the edit box, then copies the text back out.

If I’m on a Web page, I use Ctrl+F instead of Win+R, using the Web browser’s “Find text on page” dialog as the temporary edit control.

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Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

21 comments

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  • Akash Bagh

    I often use the old CUA shortcuts for cut and paste, Shift-Del and Shift-Insert

  • Brian Boorman

    A lot of applications let you right-click and “paste as”. Office apps, Outlook for example.

  • Mikko Kunnari

    I’m yet to figure out why anyone would ever want to paste something else than plain text when copy and paste is not done inside the same application. It would be nice to be a able to force plain text paste globally on Windows.

    • Brian Boorman

      You never paste between Office applications? Like a range of spreadsheet cells into Word or Powerpoint? Or a Visio diagram into Word or Powerpoint?

  • Daniel Rose

    I use a clipboard manager (Ditto), which includes an option to paste as plain text.

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