Larilyn's Tip of the Week: Pasting Plain Text

This week is a pretty short and simple tip! I know, sometimes my tips can be lengthy - some people enjoy my snark, some people don't.  

Sometimes when working with very lengthy documents - maybe something requires a lot of quoting from other sources - I will be using the cut and paste feature.  And have you ever pasted something into your document only to realize that it was formatted in some crazy way and now your document looks wonky?

You want the words, but you don't want the formatting!  So what's a person to do??

Let me introduce you to the concept of pasting plain text.  Instead of hitting Ctrl+V as one normally would, hit Ctrl+Shift+V.  This tells your program to paste just the text, not the formatting.

There is one small caveat to this.  

If you are using Microsoft Word or Outlook, they don't like to play as nicely.  You can't just paste it in.  You actually have to hit Ctrl+Alt+V which will open up a dialog box.

Select Unformatted Text and hit okay.  Then you'll be good to go!