MS Word: Creating shortcut or toolbar button for the "Paste Special..Unformatted Text" option

Question

I have been playing with this for a while, but the closest I have gotten is a button that opens the Paste Special dialog box and requires another couple of mouse clicks to paste the contents of the clipboard as unformatted text.

So often I am doing a copy-paste from a web site into a document where I don't want the additional baggage of the HTML formatting, it would be nice to be able to do this with a shortcut key or a toolbar button.

Answer 1

Make the button call the macro:

public sub PasteSpecialUnformatted()
  selection.pastespecial datatype:=wdpastetext
end sub

Answer 2

I would suggest using the PureText lightweight utility application by Steve Miller for this.

PureText runs in your system tray and listens on a global hotkey (which you can define -- I use Win+V) to perform a "paste text sans formatting" -- essentially the same operation as opening up an instance of notepad.exe, pasting into that, re-copying the resultant plain text, and then pasting into the actual target application.

The advantage of this approach is that you'll be able to perform a "paste text sans formatting" in any of your applications, not just in Word.

I first installed PureText a couple of years ago and have been using it heavily ever since; it has become a "must-have" utility application for me. Highly recommended.