How to Paste Text Without Preserving Its Original Style

You’re drafting up a Word document, and you need to incorporate text from another source. So, you move to the other document, copy the text you need, then paste it in your Word doc. But when you do, it suddenly looks wrong: The text has the style and formatting of its source, not your Word doc, throwing the whole thing off.

That’s because Word, like many apps, preserves the style of the text’s source when you paste by default. If you simply hit Ctrl + V (Command + V on Mac), you’re just going to bring that original style with you. If that’s what you want in your Word doc, you’re set, but if you want to keep your text the same throughout, you’ll need to change up how you paste.

In many cases, you can do this with a simple addition to the keyboard shortcut. Instead of using Ctrl + V (or Command + V), use Ctrl + Shift + V (or Command + Option + Shift + V on Mac). Doing this will automatically adjust the style of the copied text to match the style of the app you’re pasting to. (Note: Some apps, especially messaging apps, won’t preserve the text, even when pasting normally.)

This shortcut won’t work with Microsoft’s Office suite, however. If you’re pasting text into a Word doc for example, you’ll need to use the usual paste shortcut, then hit Ctrl again, or click the Paste button that appears. Here, you’ll see a number of additional paste options, but the one we want looks like a clipboard with an arrow pointing right. This is the “Merge Formatting” option, and it works similar to the above shortcut. You can also hit “M,” instead of clicking the icon.