Advertisement Copying and pasting are probably some of the most common functions you perform on your computer. We’ve shown how a When you think about it, copy paste is kind of weird. You copy stuff, but there's no way to see it. And if you copy over what you had, it's gone – forever., but copy-pasting brings another common annoyance: special formatting. You’ve surely experienced this: you’ll copy some text (perhaps a heading from a website) and want to paste it into a Word document, but it keeps its color, size, and other features when you do.
Jun 27, 2016 - Last week, a group of Slate staffers started commiserating about a strange frustration: They couldn't copy URLs from Google's Chrome browser.
We’re going to take a look at ways to alleviate this issue. They range from bare-bones to automated; go for whichever works for you! Let Notepad Intervene Windows are about as basic as a computer program can get. Because of this, they don’t carry the capacity for special formatting like dedicated word processors (such as Microsoft Word or the ) do. Our simplest solution is to paste any text that you want to strip of formatting into Notepad first, then copy it again.
Once you grab Notepad’s version, you’ll have only the text and won’t have to worry about any colors or alternative fonts sticking around. Try or pinning Notepad to your taskbar to be sure you can access it whenever you need to paste something. Use Office’s Special Paste A lot of pasting occurs into If you're considering an upgrade to Office 2013, or you've just paid for the package and want to make the best of it, this Microsoft Office 2013 Guide is for you., and if you’re typing a paper, Microsoft PowerPoint can do much more than boring presentations.
It’s PowerPoint 2013’s time now and the search for creative and uncommon uses of PowerPoint continues. Here are five., or preparing a graphic in Publisher, the extras are probably unwanted. Thankfully, with an extra click, you can skip the formatting when you paste in Office. You have a few ways of clearing text formatting.
First, once you paste, a small pop-up will appear and give you three options:. Keep Source Formatting will preserve the text as you copied it. (Shortcut: Press CTRL + K, to select this after pasting).
Merge Formatting will force the text you’re pasting to match the text around it. (Shortcut: Press CTRL + M, to choose this after pasting). Keep Text Only will only take the text and give it no other formatting. (Shortcut: Press CTRL+ T, to do this quickly after pasting).
When this bubble appears, you can even choose which option to set as default. If you’d like, you can also accomplish this using the Paste Special option under Paste on the left side of the Home ribbon. It’s effectively the same option, though it gains more functionality if you’re pasting more than just text. Try a Dedicated Program The above two solutions require you to manually ensure your text is stripped of its formatting, but, for Windows is a free tool that essentially does the copy-paste-copy in Notepad for you. Grab either the or the download and Were you ever faced with a.rar file and wondered how to open it? Fortunately, managing ZIP files and other compressed archives is simple with the right tools.
Here is what you need to know. (PureText doesn’t need to be installed). You won’t know it’s working other than a small PT icon Every Windows user has seen the Windows system tray (also known as the notification area) become cluttered over time. We’ve covered disabling distracting desktop notifications in the past, but what if the icons themselves are.
Right-clicking the icon will let you open the few program options. By default, the shortcut is Windows + V, which is probably fine if you haven’t on that combination. If you need something different, PureText lets you set it to pretty much anything you want. The only other options let you automatically paste the text that the program converts (which you obviously want enabled to streamline the process), play a sound upon pasting (this is annoying and you’ll want to shut it off), and run the program at startup.
If you’ll be using PureText regularly, this is a good idea; just remember that So your computer has been booting slowly lately? You probably have too many programs and services trying to start up all at once.
Are you wondering how they got there and how to remove them? Utilize Browser Extensions In addition to PureText, which works across Windows, you can install a A list of only the best extensions for Google Chrome, including suggestions from our readers. In either Chrome or Firefox, if you prefer. For Firefox, will do the trick.
After installing it, you’ll have a new Copy As Plain Text The context menu that pops up whenever you perform a right-click can help you become more productive. With the right tool, customizing the shortcuts within it is a breeze. That lets you grab anything in your browser without the formatting. If you prefer keyboard shortcuts, the extension also makes CTRL + Shift + U perform the copy. A few tweaks can be made, including removing extra space and changing special characters to regular text (such as ® to r). If you want to go all-in, Copy Plain Text 2 can also override the standard copy command completely.
Be careful with this, though! Chrome users will want to take advantage of, a counterpart to the Firefox extension. It’s slim and only allows you to copy plain text by right-clicking and choosing the new option; you won’t find any keyboard shorcuts with this one, which may be a deal-breaker. Remember Keyboard Shortcuts Frankly, We all love our browsers, and we all love the extensions that you can install with them. We love browser extensions because they allow us to do what we want our browser to do that.
For this problem, as Chrome and Firefox already include shortcuts for pasting regular text out of the box. In both browsers, simply press CTRL + Shift + V to paste text without the extras, no matter where you copied it from! Elsewhere in Windows, the shortcut CTRL + Space will clear formatting from selected text. It’s not a universal shortcut (it isn’t working in, the program I use for writing), but it will work in Office. What About Mac and Linux?
You can still easily strip the formatting using a different OS. In:.
You can use Shift + Option + Command + V to paste without formatting (or with whatever format the pasted text is placed into). The Chrome shortcut from Windows is the same: Command + Shift + Option + V, and you can install the extensions if you want. Using TextEdit, you can copy and paste text as in the first method outlined above. You may need to choose Format Make Plain Text ( Command + Shift + T); to keep formatting out by default, go to Preferences and under Format, choose Plain Text. Install a clipboard manager, such as the free, which allows you to paste unstyled text. If you’d like to force pasted text to be unstyled system-wide, head to System Preferences Keyboard Keyboard Shortcuts Application Shortcuts and click the plus sign below to add a shortcut. For the Application box, select All Applications, and in the Menu Title box, type Paste and Match Style.
Finally, in the Keyboard Shortcut box, type Command + V and you’ll see the key combination in the box. Click Add, and you’re all set! For:. In recent versions of Linux, you can use CTRL + Shift + V to paste text without formatting. Like Windows, you can paste into a text editor (try if you need one) to strip the formatting before pasting elsewhere.
The above browser extensions will work in Linux as well. You’re a Pasting Wizard As we’ve seen, it doesn’t really matter whether you copy the text without the formatting or if you wait until pasting it to strip it. Whichever methods work best for you (there’s a lot of them!) will do just fine, and you’ll save time instead of having to manually format everything. If you’re on Windows, the best combo is probably to install PureText and use that universal shortcut whenever you need a plain paste. Barring that, Chrome and Firefox’s shortcut and special pasting in Office on special occasions should mean you’re taken care of. Want to take your copy-pasting even further? Check out Copy and paste is one of the best features we have at our fingertips, especially when combined with keyboard shortcuts.
You can’t argue that copying and pasting is one of the most common things we. For increased functionality. What’s your favorite way to strip out text formatting?
Are any of these methods new to you? Paste a comment below and let me know! Image Credit: Explore more about:,.
Tab-Snap is a Chrome extension that makes it easy to copy all URLs (website addresses) of open tabs in Google Chrome – and has other great features too. It is similar to the ‘Copy URLs Expert’ add-on for Firefox that I but not as slick. Note that it was previously called ‘Grab Y’all Links’.
URLs are displayed in a list (with the webpage titles) so you can copy them to the clipboard and paste them into an email or text document etc. Tab-Snap can also import multiple URLs back into Chrome e.g. Automatically open 10 new tabs from a list of 10 URLs that you copied and saved earlier (or that someone else sent to you). Extra features in the Options are the ability to automatically pre-format a gmail message (useful for sending the links to yourself) and to convert all open tabs into a file list (in csv or txt format). Tab-Snap provides several options for handling tabs: 1. Copy URLs of all tabs in the current Chrome window. Convert all tabs to a file list.
Paste (Import) a list of URLs or a file list. It is available from Chrome Web Store.
Once installed you can access the main Tab-Snap functions from the extension’s icon as shown below. Tab-Snap Copy Open URLs CTRL+A is a hotkey to select everything in the list and CTRL+C is a hotkey to copy that selection to the clipboard. Tip: if you prefer, you can use the mouse to select (highlight) the list of URLs and then copy them by right clicking and select Copy. Restore This option restores a browsing session based on a list of URLs that you have previously saved to the clipboard. Paste a list of URLs into the input box then click ‘Open List’ – it will then open each of these URLs in a new tab in the current Chrome window.
CTRL+V is a hotkey to paste – or you can right click in the input box and select ‘Paste’. The extension can extract the http/https lines from any list – so the list can include the web page title or any other information. Tip For Chrome Users Who Use Firefox Too If you use Chrome and Firefox, you could install a very similar Firefox add-on (see our article ) to import the copied URLs directly into Firefox. This will automatically open the same tabs there – useful if you want to compare how each browser performs.
Likewise, you could use the Firefox add-on to copy URLs from Firefox and import them into Chrome with the ‘Restore’ feature of this Chrome extension. Conclusion Tab-Snap is invaluable if you regularly need to copy lots of URLs from Chrome tabs – it is so much quicker than selecting each URL and copy/pasting it manually. It has bonus features of opening (importing) tabs from a list of saved URLs and also converting tabs into a Gmail message.
If you often work with dozens of open tabs in Chrome, it can also be a good idea to copy (and paste) those open URLs for backup purposes e.g. Before upgrading or in case you close Chrome by accident.