Whenever you copy text from a website or another document and paste it into Microsoft Word, the application’s default behavior is to “Keep Source Formatting.” This means Word will automatically import the exact font face, text size, background color, and hyperlink structure from the original website and aggressively jam it into your document.
If you are trying to compile a clean, standardized report, pasting a sentence that suddenly appears in a massive, bold, blue Arial font while the rest of your document is written in 11pt Calibri is incredibly frustrating. You constantly have to highlight the pasted text, click the tiny clipboard icon, and select “Keep Text Only” to fix the formatting.
You can change Word’s global settings to ensure it always strips away foreign formatting and forces pasted text to match your current document.
How to Change the Default Paste Options
You can permanently configure Word to paste raw text by adjusting the advanced Options menu.
- Open a blank document in Microsoft Word.
- Click on File in the top-left corner of the ribbon.
- Click on Options at the bottom of the left sidebar.
- In the Word Options window, select Advanced from the left-hand navigation pane.
- Scroll down the right pane until you reach the section labeled Cut, copy, and paste.
- You will see a series of drop-down menus for different pasting scenarios (Pasting within the same document, Pasting between documents, Pasting from other programs).
- For the option labeled Pasting from other programs, click the drop-down menu and change it from “Keep Source Formatting” to Keep Text Only.
- (Optional) You can also change Pasting between documents to “Keep Text Only” if you frequently deal with messy Word files from coworkers.
- Click OK at the bottom of the window to save your changes.
From now on, whenever you press Ctrl+V, Microsoft Word will silently strip away all fonts, colors, and bolding from the clipboard, dropping the raw text seamlessly into your document matching your exact current style.