Alright, I’ll shut up about Word. But first…
May 4th, 2010 by handolio
I’m aware I’ve posted a lot about Word lately, but since buying the new netbook I’ve been determined to knuckle under and really try to work with Microsoft’s software rather than just bleating about it. It’s been wild.
I’ve discovered what many of you will know: Internet Explorer is beyond rescue, Windows 7 is fine after a bit of tweaking and – a surprise to me at least – Word can be quite good if you can be bothered to change the behaviours that annoy you*.
The remaining one on my list was Word’s default behaviour when pasting text you’ve copied from another source – it tries to preserve the formatting, which normally means the wrong font and point size for your document, and often the wrong alignment.
You can paste text-only on a case-by-case basis by choosing Paste Special from the Paste menu of the Home ribbon. You can also customise the Quick Access Toolbar as I’ve done on the right, to include a Paste Special shortcut (and one for Word Count, in my case). Do this by dropping down the little black arrow thing you see to the right of it.
But try as I might, I can’t think when I’d actually want the default behaviour of preserving the source formatting, and it’s easy to change it:
-Click Word’s nameless round button
-At the bottom of the menu that appears click Word Options
-Click Advanced in the left-hand pane
-Under Cut, copy, and paste (Bonus points are available here for not giving a fuck about the Oxford comma), drop down the box next to Pasting from other programs, and change it to Keep Text Only
-Click OK to save the change
*For the record, Scott Lawson has pointed this out on multiple occasions and I chose cheap insults rather than to listen to him. What can I say? Some people just won’t be told.
I thought I’d add, seeing you like being pointed out things, that the nameless round button does have a name, its called the Office button.