Strip Formatting When Copying and Pasting in Windows
Here’s a quick tip if you do a lot of copying and pasting of text riddled with unwanted formatting.
All you need to do is copy the desired text and then paste it into Notepad. Once in Notepad, just copy the text once again and paste it into the desired location (be it a document, spreadsheet, etc).
It’ll save you stack of time trying to manually remove various formatting applied to text such as colour, bold, italics and varied font sizings.
Boydo
My name is Boyd and I’m a Service Management Specialist with a knack for operational data gathering, transformation, analysis and reporting.
In 2012, I obtained my Masters of Science in Information Technology through the University of New South Wales @ The Australia Defence Force Academy (UNSW@ADFA).
I was also part of an online community known as the Panasonic Insider Crew in the capacity of “Insider Guru” for Panasonic Australia where I interacted with other tech enthusiasts and find out more about Panasonic's latest gadgets.
I love technology, gadgets, and the Internet and maintain a keen interest in these areas locally, nationally, and globally. I hope by sharing my views on these topics that people will receive an honest point of view from someone with a genuine interest in these topics.
I have also written and edited articles for Neowin - you can check out my articles over @ https://www.neowin.net/news/poster/boyd_chan
I hope you enjoy reading my blog!
2 comments
It’s one of my favourite tricks. There’s also a basic find/replace all function that you can cut-n-paste non-standard characters (such as bullets) into to remove. It’s also worth highlighting (Ctrl-A) the whole thing to get a feel for what whitespace you still have left in your text … oh, and turn off word wrap so you can see and remove unnecessary carriage returns (new lines).
The flip side of this, of course, is the practice of cut-n-pasting into Word (or equiv) to run a spell check on your unformatted text (like I did with this comment 🙂 )
Author
Some sound advice indeed – Notepad is definitely a lean, mean, formatting assassin!