If you ever use Paste Special in Microsoft Word 2007, you may really love this tip.
We lawyers tend to use the “Paste Special–Unformatted Text” option often. When you copy text from Westlaw or some other online legal research tool, you use paste special to paste just the text into your document and avoid have different fonts or inadvertently hypertexted case names.
One of the improvements of Microsoft Office 2007 was to have a big Paste Button under the Office Button with a downward pointing arrow under it that lets you access Paste Special easily. Even better is to add Paste Special to the Quick Access Toolbar or use the Keyboard combination Alt + Ctrl + V to launch it.
But then you still need to go through the dialog box to click Unformatted Text and OK. Today you will learn to set up a new keystroke combination to paste unformatted text from your clipboard into a document in one action. And, since this is over 90% of my usage of Paste Special, I assigned the keystroke Alt + Ctrl + V to do this. I’ll just click the button on the Quick Access Toolbar if I need to paste special some other way.
I found these instructions in Smart Computing magazine. Even without the editors granting me free reprint rights, I’m happy to note that I love Smart Computing magazine. The September 2009 Edition where I found this tip focused on mastering your browser with lots of great info, but it also included how to set up Windows Home Server by yourself, performance enhancements for the Mac, home decoration websites and many other features. Subscribers get access to online archives of past issues of the magazine together with some sister publications.
The following is © 2009 Smart Computing and reprinted here with permission. All other rights reserved.
Paste Using A Macro
By creating a macro, you can paste unformatted text using a simple key combination instead of going through a dialog box. Although this requires opening the Visual Basic Editor, you don’t need to know Visual Basic to perform this task. We will give you the simple code to do it.
Go to the View tab and click the Macros button (not the arrow) in the Macro group. In the Name box in the Macros dialog box, type PasteSpecial (do not put a space between the words Paste and Special) and press ENTER. The Microsoft Visual Basic editor opens. Delete all of the text in the code editor and paste or type the text included between the blue lines below. (If copy/paste doesn’t work, try typing it instead.)
________________
Sub PasteSpecial ()
Selection. PasteSpecial DataType:=wdPasteText
End Sub
_________________
(Blogger’s note: An image of the macro text accompanies this article, but you cannot copy from it.)
Once you’ve added that text to Visual Basic Editor, click File and Save Normal and close the Editor. You now have a macro that will paste unformatted text into a Word document. Next, you need to assign that macro to a key combination.
Click the Office button and choose Word Options. Click Customize on the left and then click the Customize button next to the words Keyboard Shortcuts. In the Categories area on the left, choose Macros. Select the PasteSpecial macro on the right. Click in the Press New Shortcut Key area. Choose a combination, such as ALT-CTRL-P. (Make sure not to choose a key combination that you already use often.) Simply press those keys to create the new command. Click Assign, Close, and OK.
Try the macro by copying some formatted text. Click in the Word document where you want to insert the text and press the key combination you assigned (such as ALT-CTRL-P). The unformatted text is copied into the document.
Having the option to quickly paste unformatted text into a document makes performing a fundamental operation in Word that much easier.
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