Word for Windows and macOS gets key combination for plain pasting

Microsoft will soon introduce a plain text pasting feature in Word. The functionality has existed for some time in the browser version of Word and Microsoft Teams, but the desktop version of Microsoft’s word processor does not yet have this.

Microsoft announces the arrival of ‘paste text only’ in a blog post. Pasting without formatting is already possible via the paste special command, but that requires a few more steps to achieve the same result. The feature is currently available in test versions of the app. The feature works for Microsoft 365 beta users running at least version 16.0.15831.20174 for Windows. For Microsoft 365 for Mac, this is beta version 16.67.1113.0. The company doesn’t mention when the feature will come to the release version of Microsoft 365.

Pasting without formatting means that additional data in a copied text, such as font size, font, color, and hyperlinks, are not included when pasting. In many applications that support this, the shortcut for this is ctrl+shift+v. However, that shortcut does not currently work in the release version of Word for desktops. This will change with the release of the ‘paste text only’ feature. On macOS this is cmd + shift + v, but macOS also has the systemwide key combination cmd + opt + shift + v, which does the same.

In a blog post Microsoft explains further details around the functionality, such as new shortcuts for the format painter and support for retaining certain formatting, such as bullet points.

Microsoft provides a demo of paste without formatting in action. Click for a gif.