The Pasting Problem
When you copy text from a website, a PDF, or another application and paste it into Google Docs, the default behaviour is to retain the original source formatting. This means you often accidentally paste massive, bold red fonts, weird background highlights, or strange bullet point styles that completely break the flow of your document. To counter this, many users learn the “Paste without formatting” shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+V or Cmd+Shift+V). However, if you are rapidly copying and pasting data using only a mouse (via the right-click menu), relying on the keyboard shortcut is cumbersome, and the standard right-click “Paste” will always bring in the garbage formatting.
Forcing Plain Text by Default
To streamline your workflow and ensure that copied text always perfectly matches the font and styling of your current Google Doc paragraph, you must learn to rely on the dedicated unformatted paste option.
Unfortunately, Google Docs does not currently offer a global toggle switch to make “Paste without formatting” the absolute default behaviour for the standard Ctrl+V command. You must actively choose it. When you are ready to insert text using your mouse, right-click the exact spot where you want the text to appear. Do not click the standard “Paste” option at the top of the menu. Instead, look slightly further down the list and explicitly click Paste without formatting. This strips away all HTML tags, font sizes, colours, and hyperlinks from the clipboard, dropping the text into your document as raw, plain text that instantly adopts the styling of the surrounding sentence.