I love looking through the configuration options in products like Microsoft Office. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are applications used on a daily basis and over time we get used to the way things work but there are often small changes that can be made which can make a big difference in an features effectiveness. One such configuration setting, found whilst browsing through the settings, affects pasting text in Microsoft Word 2010.

Usually, when we copy something then paste it into Microsoft Word the program tries hard to retain the existing formatting of what is being copied. So, style headers and formatting may be pasted along with the rest of the content. I don’t know about you but I work with a great deal of text so for me I would often prefer just the text part of a section to be pasted and all other formatting ignored. This can be achieved by heading into “Paste Special”, on the “Home” tab of the ribbon bar, then pulling down the arrow under “Paste” and selecting a different option such as “Unformatted Text”. It takes a little longer than a standard paste but it’s something that we get used to doing over time.

However, this behaviour can be changed in the configuration settings section of Word. Head into File on the ribbon bar, then Options, click on the Advanced tab, then scroll down to the section entitled “Cut, copy, and paste”.

There are four key areas in this section that can be configured for Paste behaviour. These behaviours are: Keep Source Formatting (Default), Merge Formatting, use Destination Styles (Default) – applies to Pasting between documents when styles conflict, and Keep Text Only.

Changing the default behaviour to “Keep Text Only” will, as the option says, tell Word to paste just the text only and no other formatting. You can configure these on pasting between documents, from other programs, of from within the same document.

You can go one step further here and also remove any bullets and number lists when pasting and even use the Insert button for pasting (which is a key less than the usual CTRL-V or ALT-E-S combination).