Anyone who’s ever tried to copy text from, say, a webpage to an email or document knows the struggle. You’re document might be nicely formatted in a 10 point Arial font, but the text you paste in retains its crazy 20 point Comic Sans font from the source page.

So, I was momentarily excited to read a recent article from Bleeping Computer announcing a potential end to the pasting nightmare. The article discussed upcoming changes to your Windows clipboard functionality allowing you to paste historical clips free of formatting and suggested that the ability to paste format-free current clipboard items may even be available in Windows 10 today:

“Although one can also use the CTRL+SHIFT+V keyboard shortcut to remove all formatting when pasting text content sent to the clipboard, this doesn’t work with clipboard history items.”

Bleeping Computer

Really? You mean, today, Windows contains this feature I have longed for for most of my computing life?

Well, it depends on the application in which you are pasting. If you are pasting text into editors hosted in browsers like Firefox and Chrome, then, yes, Ctrl+Shift+V seems to work. However, if you are pasting text into Microsoft Office products on your desktop–which is where I do the majority of my work–Ctrl+Shift+V doesn’t seem to work at all.

Indeed, Chtrl+Shift+V isn’t even listed as a valid keyboard shortcut on Microsoft’s site, so I’m altogether confused by the statements being made by Bleeping Computer. Perhaps we must still wait for the release of Build 21318 before we can enjoy native format-free pasting, historical or otherwise.

In the meantime, one frustrating way to clear your clipboard text of formatting is to first paste the text into an application that supports no formatting at all, like Microsoft Notepad. Then, copy the text from Notepad to its final destination.

However, what I do is use the application PureText by Steve Miller. (I assume not that Steve Miller.) PureText is a fantastic little utility that does the job Windows should be doing: providing you the ability to paste format-free text in any application running on your Windows machine.