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.

That’s right, whenever you see a dialog in Windows, like this:

A typical Windows error message dialog.

You can press CTRL+C to copy, and then open up Notepad, and press CTRL+V to paste:

The dialog title, contents, and even the button text are saved to the clipboard.

I had no idea this was possible until I read a Lifehacker article explaining it.  Since I’ve started using it, I’ve found it very useful in my every day work. Maybe you will too!

Just a note, though – it doesn’t seem to work everywhere. For example, JavaScript alert dialogs can’t be copied in Firefox, but they can in Internet Explorer.

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.