Don’t Let Copy-Paste Turn Your Emails Into Ransom Notes
You type an email, paste text from a Word document, and suddenly half of your email has the same font as the document. Or you insert a title in a Google Doc and it appears as a huge 48-point text. This is the pesky default pasting behavior in most Windows, macOS and web applications. You look sloppy in outgoing documents and emails. Here’s how to fix it.
Method 1: add a shift
In some, but not all, applications, when you press Ctrl-V (Win) / Cmd-V (Mac), you can also press Shift. This activates the “Insert and Match Style”, which converts the text to the same style as the target document. This is usually what you want.
On Mac, some applications force you to press Option, Shift and Cmd. It’s annoying to guess which one each app uses. But you can fix it with our next method.
Method 2. Create a keyboard shortcut
On macOS, you can easily assign a keyboard shortcut to any menu item . You can assign Cmd-Shift-V to “Insert and Match Style” so that it always works in any application.
Or you can change the default behavior: assign Cmd-V for ” Paste and Match Style” and Cmd-Shift-V for ” Paste” . Developer Craig Hockenberry wrote a manual for this particular case , including a few details to make sure everything is exactly right.
To assign a keyboard shortcut in Windows , you need a third-party application . Gizmodo recommends the free WinHotKey and AutoHotkey apps.
There is another option on Windows: download PureText , a free formatting remover app. A dedicated paste app seems like a lot, but it’s no worse than loading an app with hotkeys.
But remember
There are a few cases where you really want to paste with formatting. The most common is when you insert linked text. Let’s say you want to insert the previous paragraph into an email while keeping the links intact. In some applications, using ” Insert and Match Style” will delete this text.
You have two options, both of which stink. You can “insert and match a style”, but you will need to manually add links back. Or you can paste and you will need to manually change the font and text size.
In Gmail, select all of the pasted text and open the formatting options menu next to the Send button. Choose a font and font size that matches the rest of your email. (If unsure, highlight all email before choosing font and size.) If possible, change text color and bold / italic / underline options.
After downloading applications and assigning keyboard shortcuts, you have successfully moved a line of text from one part of your computer to another. Congratulations! Computers make life easier!