One of the major pet peeves I have with Windows concerns the text formatting limitations when pasting text from another source. You may wish to paste plain text, without any extra formatting in Windows, but it’s never easy to accomplish. Consider a real life example that I’m sure we’ve all encountered at least once in our lives:

I’m sitting at my desk composing an email love letter. I’ve already melted her heart but to seal the deal I’d like to insert a quote from Chaucer at the very end of the note. I search the web, find the quote, but it just so happens that the blogger chose to display it using size 29 font with an obnoxious background color to boot.

The email looks perfect…until I paste in the quote. With such inconsistency in font size, shape, and color there is no way she will ever fall in love with me! Energies already spent digging so deep into the recesses of my heart, I must now find the strength to correct the formatting to make the letter appealing. Such work!

Since this has happened to me on more than one occasion I have developed a shortcut, which I’m sure many of us are familiar with. The only way to get past this problem is to “neuter” the formatting. This requires opening up our good friend Notepad, pasting the text into it, then copying it from Notepad to the intended source in order to see the original text.

End of the world? No.

Annoying? Yes.

Assign Keyboard Shortcuts to Paste Text by Using PureText

PureText allows you to create a keyboard shortcut that will strip the formatting of text so it is pasted without any formatting.

PureText works by assigning the paste command to a combination of keys that you normally wouldn’t use, known as a hotkey. For example, you could assign PureText the following custom keyboard shortcut: Windows key + V.

Let’s say you copy text from a website that has a completely different font and format than what you are working with in Word, or Excel. Rather than pasting the text via Control key + V, you would use the PureText hotkey instead. After pasting via PureText, any text would be unformatted, thereby matching the original text of the document. Voila, problem solved!

What’s nice is that the custom keyboard shortcut set in PureText allows the user to strip text formatting in any program running on Windows: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Google Docs.

Perhaps I make too much fuss over the issue but it has really saved me time, especially at work. PureText is a simple program that runs in the Windows system tray. Thus far I’ve had no real hassles working with it and best of all it’s free to use!

You can get your free copy by clicking here. Alternatively, you can visit the PureText website to learn more about the program and browse various verisons.