The Colorful Paste
Google Docs attempts to be helpful by preserving the exact styling of any text you copy from the internet. While this might seem useful, it usually leads to a chaotic document. If you are writing a standard report in black text and you paste a paragraph copied from a heavily stylized website, Google Docs will automatically change the font color of the pasted text to match the source—bringing over light greys, dark blues, or even bright red text, completely ruining the uniform look of your document and forcing you to manually re-highlight and recolor the pasted section.
Stripping the Pigment
To ensure your document maintains a professional, uniform appearance and stop Google Docs from automatically changing the font color when you paste, you must bypass the standard clipboard behavior.
When you use the standard paste command (Ctrl+V or Cmd+V), you are telling the browser to include the invisible HTML color tags associated with the copied text. To strip these tags away and force the text to adopt the exact color of the paragraph you are currently typing in (which should be black), you must use the “paste without formatting” command. After copying your text from the external website, click into your Google Doc where you want it to appear. Instead of a normal paste, press Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows/ChromeOS, or Cmd+Shift+V on a Mac. Google Docs will strip away all external colors, bolding, and font sizes, inserting the raw text to perfectly match the surrounding black ink.