Are you tired of pasting text with weird formatting and messy elements into Windows?
If you work a lot on your computer, you may already be familiar with some keyboard shortcuts that save you time. But have you ever heard of the Ctrl+Shift+V key combination? This little-known shortcut lets you paste text without preserving the original formatting, which can be very useful in many situations. In this article, we'll explain everything you need to know about the Ctrl+Shift+V keyboard shortcut. Ready to discover a new, handy and incredibly effective keyboard shortcut?
Paste text without formatting with Ctrl+Shift+V
By default, when you copy with Ctrl+C and paste with Ctrl+V in Windows, the clipboard not only captures the text you have selected, but also the style that accompanies it and therefore the formatting. This includes the font style, the text color, attributes like bold and italics, and even bulleted lists. This behavior has been built into Windows since at least Windows 3.1 in 1992. Suffice to say, you've had to get used to it and probably come to terms with it.
But if you're here, you probably don't know that there's an easy way to avoid this problem.. So the next time you want to paste just the text without any formatting or styling information, press Ctrl + Shift + V on your keyboard in Windows 10 or Windows 11 (on Mac, you can press Option+Shift+Command+V for a similar result, by the way).
Yes, quite simply! The Ctrl+Shift+V command allows you to paste text without formatting. It took me 30 years to learn it and now it's a keyboard shortcut that is essential for me!
The workaround for Microsoft Word
Unfortunately, Microsoft has its faults and the computer giant has not integrated this keyboard shortcut into Word.
So, in Microsoft Word, the Ctrl+Shift+V command doesn't work. You need to use a special option in the ribbon menu. To do this, switch to the "Home" tab and click "Paste", then select the icon that looks like a clipboard with an "A" on it ("Keep Text Only"), which will paste the text without formatting it.
You can also change the default behavior in Word so that text is always pasted without formatting. To do this, go to File> Options. In the Options menu that opens, click Advanced options in the lateral bar, then choose Keep text only in the section drop-down menus Cut, copy and paste. This way you can make Ctrl+V always paste as "Keep Text Only" in Word.
In short, even if the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+V does not work with Word, it is a particularly useful shortcut since it allows you to directly paste text without its formatting!
If you use other little-known shortcuts, feel free to tell us about them in the comments below. I'm sure you'll make people happy!
