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Paste plain text into Mac Word documents using a shortcut

hacks

Man, one thing that makes my life a tad bit more difficult is pasting copied text into Word documents and then having Word render the text in some font other than what the document font is set at.

One way around this is a kludge: you can hit Edit -> Paste Special... and then select "Unformatted text" and then hit return. That's not fun when you have to do it often. So, here are the steps to set up a quick macro (plus key combo) that will allow you to do this yourself with a keystroke.

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  1. First, you need to define a macro for the "past unformatted text" action. Open Tools -> Macros -> Macro...

  2. Type "PasteUnformattedText" into the "Macro name:" field and hit the "Create" button.

  3. Paste the following text where the cursor is:

    ' ' equivalent to Edit>Paste Special>Unformatted Text ' Selection.PasteSpecial datatype:=wdPasteText

  4. Then hit "Close and return to Microsoft Word". You can test the macro by copying some crazy text from the web and hitting Tools -> Macros -> Macro... and selecting the "PasteUnformattedText" macro. It should past plain text while the regular Cmd-V pastes formatted text.

  5. Now we need to assign a key shortcut to this macro. Hit Tools -> Customize -> Customize Keyboard...

  6. In the "Categories:" menu, scroll down and select "Macros".

  7. Select "PastUnformattedText" in the "Macros:" section.

  8. Click on the field labeled: "Press new shortcut key:".

  9. Type a shortcut for this macro... I chose Shift-Cmd-V so that it would be very similar to the regular Cmd-V for pasting. You could also just swap the two.

  10. Hit "OK" and test it out. Viola!