How to paste without formatting in Word, Google Docs, Slack, and email

The shortcuts

Start here — most of the time one of these is all you need.

• Windows, most apps: Ctrl + Shift + V
• macOS, most apps: Cmd + Option + Shift + V
• Google Docs: Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + V, or Edit → Paste without formatting
• Microsoft Word: Ctrl + Alt + V → Unformatted Text, or paste then Ctrl and choose Keep Text Only
• Slack: Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + V
• Gmail: Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + V, or Remove formatting (Tx) in the toolbar after pasting
• Any code editor: pasting is already plain text — editors hold no rich text at all

Google Docs also has Format → Clear formatting (Ctrl/Cmd + \) for text already in the document.

Why pasting carries formatting at all

The clipboard is not a single piece of text. When you copy from a web page or a document, the source app puts **several representations** on it simultaneously — typically HTML, rich text (RTF), and plain text.

The receiving app picks whichever it prefers, and most word processors and email clients prefer the richest available. That is why the pasted text arrives with the source's font, size, colour, and line spacing, and why it can look wildly out of place.

"Paste without formatting" simply tells the receiving app to take the plain-text representation instead. The plain-text version was on the clipboard the whole time.

When the shortcuts are not enough

Plain-text pasting solves fonts and colours. It does not solve everything, because these survive the conversion — they are characters, not formatting:

• Non-breaking spaces from   in HTML, which look like spaces but are not.
• Curly quotes and em dashes, which stay curly and long in plain text.
• Zero-width characters picked up from a web page.
• Line breaks at every visual line ending, if the source was a PDF.
• Markdown syntax, if the source was an AI assistant.

This is the usual reason a paste "still looks wrong" after using the shortcut. The styling is gone; the problem characters remain.

A quick diagnostic: if the text now matches the surrounding font but still behaves oddly — a search that misses, a form that rejects it, spacing that will not tidy — the issue is characters rather than formatting.

The intermediate-editor trick

A common workaround is to paste into Notepad or TextEdit first, then copy from there into the real destination. This works because those apps hold only plain text, so everything else is discarded in transit.

It is effective and requires nothing extra, with two caveats. TextEdit defaults to rich text and must be switched to plain text (Format → Make Plain Text) or it will not strip anything. And the round trip still leaves non-breaking spaces, curly quotes, and invisible characters intact — it removes styling, not characters.

Pasting into a CMS

Content management systems are where pasted formatting causes the most lasting damage, because the styling is written into the stored HTML. A paragraph pasted from Word can carry inline styles, class names, and empty span elements that then override the site theme — and stay there permanently.

For anything going into a CMS, strip to plain text first and let the CMS apply its own formatting. It is far quicker than cleaning the markup afterwards.