By default, whenever you paste text from a web browser into a Microsoft Word document, Word attempts to preserve the exact HTML formatting of the original source. It will copy over font sizes, bold text, embedded hyperlinks, and even background colors. Immediately after pasting, Word throws a small floating “Paste Options” button next to the pasted text, offering you a dropdown menu to change the formatting to “Keep Text Only.”
While this is sometimes useful for preserving complex tables, it is completely infuriating for professional writers, students, and editors who simply want raw text to conform to their document’s existing font style. Having to manually click the tiny “Paste Options” clipboard icon and select “Keep Text Only” every single time you paste a sentence from Wikipedia adds thousands of unnecessary clicks to your workflow. If you want Word to automatically strip all formatting upon pasting and permanently banish the floating clipboard icon, you must completely disable the Paste Options feature.
Disabling Paste Options via Word Settings
You can force Word to default to “Keep Text Only” and kill the floating popup menu directly from the advanced settings.
- Open the Microsoft Word desktop application.
- Bypass the Start Screen by clicking Blank document to enter the main editing interface.
- Look at the main menu ribbon at the top of the screen and click on File (in the top-left corner).
- Scroll to the absolute bottom of the left-hand blue sidebar and click on Options.
- A new Options window will appear. In the left-hand menu, click on Advanced.
- Scroll down the main right-hand panel until you locate the section labelled Cut, copy, and paste.
- You will see several dropdown menus detailing paste behaviour. Change the dropdown for Pasting from other programs to Keep Text Only.
- (Optional but recommended): Change the dropdowns for “Pasting within the same document” and “Pasting between documents” to Keep Text Only as well.
- Scroll slightly further down within the same section and locate the checkbox labelled Show Paste Options button when content is pasted.
- Completely uncheck this box.
- Click OK at the bottom of the window to save your changes.
The change takes effect instantly. You can now highlight a massively complex, color-coded table from a website and press Ctrl+V in your Word document. The text will instantly appear in pure, unformatted black-and-white, conforming perfectly to your document’s default font. The annoying floating clipboard button will never appear, allowing you to edit seamlessly without visual interruptions.