Word for Windows and macOS gets keyboard shortcut for paste without formatting

Microsoft will soon introduce a plain text paste 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 it.

Microsoft announces the arrival of ‘paste text only’ in a blog post. Pasting without formatting is already possible via the paste special command, but it takes a little more steps to achieve the same result. The feature is currently available in trial 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. When the feature will come to the Microsoft 365 release version, the company does not mention.

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

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

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