Pasting Text Without Formatting In Google Chrome
As part of my regular use of Gmail, I often find myself pasting text from web into my e-mails. Since the Gmail editor supports rich-text, pasting generally includes the formating, which, most of the time, simply does not make sense within the e-mail. For years, I have been using a trick to get around this - one which involved using the almighty Windows Notepad. By simply pasting the text into Notepad, and then copying it from there, I make sure the formating is not brought over. This works because Notepad itself does not support formating. As useful as this trick is, I often found myself wondering whether there were better options available.
A few days ago, as I was writing an e-mail to a prospective client, I made the mistake of writing it in Google Docs, and then copying it over to Gmail. With the Notepad trick applied, I would have been fine – but it slipped my mind in this occasion. Copying text from Google Docs had one immediate effect – it meant the Google Docs font would be used in the Gmail Editor. In itself, not a problem – but as I continued working on the e-mail, I found myself copying another specific subset of the Google Doc, and pasting it in the middle of the e-mail. All looked fine within the editor, but after it was sent, one flaw was made immediately apparent:
Notice the unnecessary extra spacing? It appeared immediately after the content I pasted from Google Docs. To make matters worse, part of my e-mail explained how I put emphasis on perfecting the content I produce. Words cannot express how infuriating it is for a perfectionist to express his perfectionism, only to realize he sent an obviously imperfect e-mail.
I immediately sought to find a solution, once and for all, to ensure I never make such a mistake again. After some searching, I discovered that the good folks at Google already took steps to fix this browser “feature”. While using Google Chrome, one can simply press CTRL + SHIFT + V to paste without formating. Since Google Chrome is my browser of choice, this covers 90% of my use cases, making it a solid solution. Hopefully other browsers will start implementing similar features, permanently resolving the issue.
Converting Formatted Text from the Clipboard to Plain Text
Usually when I copy text from web pages, I really don’t want the formatting from the webpage to be kept. I just want to have the text in the simplest format possible, and then I can set my own styles. Unfortunately, this isn’t normally how it works. Typically, when copying from a web page in a browser, it may also copy any tables, images, and styles that are applied to or mixed with the text. This does depend on where you are pasting the text, though. In my case, I use Microsoft Word most of the time. Word supports a lot of web page elements, meaning they will likely appear in the Word document.
Consider the following text:
This is some example text. You’ll notice that numerous styles are applied.
Here are some bullet points:
- One
- Two
- Three
- Three Part 1
- Three Part 2
- Four
If I wanted to copy that text to Microsoft Word, here is what I’d see:
Word is pretty good at keeping the formatting mostly intact; however, sometimes, this isn't desired.
The formatting is mostly intact. What if you didn’t want that? What if you just wanted plain text, and you wanted to choose your own styles from scratch? There is one way to do it from within Word (click the 
button for these options), but I’ll show you how to do it without such a feature. To achieve this, I paste the text into Notepad. Yes, Notepad – the simple text editor provided by Windows. Here’s what the text will look like, once pasted:
Notice how the image is gone, and all the styles are removed? Now you can copy this text instead, and paste it in Word:
No more formatting!
No more styles, bullets, or image. You can now style it exactly as you want, without having to start off with the same formatting as the web page. This isn’t, perfect, though – you may have to make corrections to the plain text copy in Notepad, as the removal of the formatting sometimes leaves the text with improper indentation.
I’ve used this little trick in a few different scenarios. Here’s an example: Sometimes I include a quote from a website in my e-mails. The default format for my e-mails is rich text, but when I include something from another source, I really don’t care about formatting – I’ll set my own formatting to suit my e-mail. If I just copy paste the quote into my e-mail, it will include the formatting – this usually ruins the look of my e-mail. To prevent this, what I do first is use Notepad to destroy the formatting, and then paste the plain-text version into my e-mail.