Paste text without formatting

Updated: 12/31/2020 by Computer Hope
Plain text versus formatted text.

With rich-text, like text found on a web page, Word document, or e-mail, the formatting remains when it's copied and pasted elsewhere. For example, if you were to copy this paragraph of text, "This is bold" it would remain bold when you paste it into any other document that supports rich-text. Anyone needs plain text pasting frequently may find having a universal keyboard shortcut beneficial.

Free Software

We recommend the free tool PureText, which runs in the background and can paste plain text into any program using the same keyboard shortcut your choosing (Windows key+V by default). PureText can remove font faces, font styles (i.e., bold, italic, etc.), font colors, paragraph styles, extra spacing, tables, and pictures from any text you copy.

Download PureText

Tip

In most versions of Windows Ctrl+Shift+V also often pastes text as plain text.