How to paste text without formatting (Windows, Mac, Word, Google Docs)

To paste without formatting, press Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows. It works in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Edge, Chrome and Firefox. On a Mac, press Option+Shift+Command+V, which Apple calls Paste and Match Style. In Word for Mac and Google Docs, Command+Shift+V does the same thing. Either way you get the words without their font, size, color, background or links, and the pasted text takes on the formatting of the text around it. The sections below list the shortcut and menu for each program, show how to make plain text the default in Word, and explain what to do when a program has no such option.

Shortcuts at a glance

Where you paste	Windows	Mac
Microsoft Word (Microsoft 365)	Ctrl+Shift+V	Command+Shift+V
Google Docs	Ctrl+Shift+V	Command+Shift+V
Edge, Chrome, Firefox (web forms, email, CMS editors)	Ctrl+Shift+V	Option+Shift+Command+V, where the browser supports it
macOS apps with Paste and Match Style	–	Option+Shift+Command+V
Any Windows program, with PowerToys installed	Ctrl+Win+Alt+V	–

Word’s own shortcut list gives “Paste text only” as Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows and Cmd+Shift+V on Mac. Google’s list of Docs shortcuts gives “Paste without formatting” as Ctrl+Shift+V on a PC and ⌘+Shift+V on a Mac. On Microsoft’s developer blog, Raymond Chen notes that Edge, Chrome and Firefox all use Ctrl+Shift+V for “paste as plain text”. Apple describes Option-Shift-Command-V as applying “the style of the surrounding content to the item pasted”. The result is the same as plain text: the pasted words pick up the font of the paragraph you paste into.

None of these are system-wide on Windows. Each program decides what Ctrl+Shift+V does, and some give it another job or nothing at all.

Microsoft Word: paste options and a plain-text default

Word gives you three ways to paste without formatting.

1. Shortcut. Press Ctrl+Shift+V (Cmd+Shift+V on a Mac).
2. Paste Options button. Paste normally with Ctrl+V, then click the small Paste Options button that appears next to the text and choose Keep Text Only (or press T).
3. Make it the default. In Word for Windows, go to File > Options > Advanced. Under Cut, copy, and paste, set the paste settings you care about to Keep Text Only and click OK.

The default can be set separately for four situations: Pasting within the same document, Pasting between documents, Pasting between documents when style definitions conflict and Pasting from other programs. To clean up text copied from web pages and email, change only Pasting from other programs. Copying within your own documents then still keeps its styles.

The Paste Options button has more choices than just “all formatting” or “none”:

Option	What it keeps	Use it when
Keep Source Formatting	Everything, including the source’s styles	The copied look is what you want
Merge Formatting	Emphasis such as bold and italic; drops most other formatting	Quoting text whose italics matter
Keep Text Only	Only the text; drops formatting, pictures and tables	Copying from the web, email or PDFs
Picture (Microsoft 365)	Pastes the text as an image	The text must not be edited

Keep Text Only also turns tables into plain paragraphs, so paste tables with one of the other options. If text is already in your document with the wrong look, select it and press Ctrl+Space to remove character formatting, or Ctrl+Q to remove paragraph formatting (both Windows shortcuts from Microsoft’s list).

Google Docs

Press Ctrl+Shift+V (Windows, ChromeOS) or ⌘+Shift+V (Mac). To clean text that is already in the document, select it and press Ctrl+\ (⌘+\ on a Mac) to clear its formatting.

The keyboard is more reliable than the mouse in Docs. Google’s help explains that most browsers don’t let web apps such as Docs use your clipboard through menus. Chrome is the exception: there you can also paste from Docs’ Edit menu. In other browsers, use the shortcut.

Windows: when a program has no plain-text paste

Some desktop programs and older web editors offer no plain-text option at all. You have three choices.

• PowerToys Advanced Paste. Microsoft’s free PowerToys utilities include Advanced Paste. Once it is turned on in PowerToys Settings, Ctrl+Win+Alt+V pastes the clipboard as plain text in any program, and Win+Shift+V opens a window with more formats. Microsoft says Paste as Plain Text runs locally and does not use AI.
• Use a plain text box as a filter. Paste into Notepad or any plain text field, select everything, copy it again and then paste where you need it. Raymond Chen uses the Run box for this (Win+R, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Esc). A text box on a web page works the same way.
• Office Paste Special. In older Office versions without Ctrl+Shift+V, Chen points to Ctrl+Alt+V, which opens Paste Special, and then Unformatted Text.

Clipboard history (Win+V) lets you pick older items: Microsoft’s help says it keeps up to 25 entries, which are cleared when you restart, except pinned ones. It does not remove formatting by itself, so use it together with one of the methods above.

Mac: Paste and Match Style

In apps that support it, Option+Shift+Command+V pastes the text in the style of the surrounding content. Support depends on the app, so if nothing happens, paste into a plain text box first, as described for Windows above. Word and Google Docs use Command+Shift+V instead, as listed above. Apple also has two related shortcuts: Option+Command+C (Copy Style) and Option+Command+V (Paste Style). These copy formatting from one place to another, which is the opposite of removing it.

When the “formatting” is HTML code or messy spacing

Sometimes plain-text paste is not enough, because the formatting is part of the text itself. Two common cases:

You have the HTML source. This happens when you copy from a CMS code view, an email template, an export or a page’s source. Any plain-text paste keeps the tags, because to the clipboard they are just characters. Paste the code into Remove HTML tags. With both options on (Keep line breaks from <p>, <br>, <li> and headings and Decode entities), this input:

<h2 style="font-family:Georgia">Refund policy</h2>
<p>Returns are accepted within <b>30&nbsp;days</b> of delivery.</p>
<ul><li>Keep the receipt</li><li>Use the <a href="https://example.com/returns">returns form</a></li></ul>

becomes:

Refund policy
Returns are accepted within 30 days of delivery.
Keep the receipt
Use the returns form

Each heading, paragraph and list item ends up on its own line, and the line breaks in the source code are collapsed, as a browser would show them. If you turn off the line-break option, everything joins into one line with spaces where the breaks were (“Keep the receipt Use the returns form”), so leave it on for lists. The tool also deletes <script> and <style> blocks along with their contents. The link text stays but the address (https://example.com/returns) goes, just as with a plain-text paste. Links are covered in the FAQ below.

The text is plain but the spacing is wrong. Text from PDFs, web pages and decoded   entities often has double spaces, tabs, spaces at the start of lines and non-breaking spaces that look normal but don’t match in a search. Paste it into Remove extra spaces. With the default options (trim lines, replace tabs, convert odd spaces):

Before	After
Quarterly results were strong .	Quarterly results were strong .
⇥ Revenue rose 12% ( year on year ) .	Revenue rose 12% ( year on year ) .

Tick Remove spaces before punctuation as well and you get Quarterly results were strong. and Revenue rose 12% (year on year). In this example a non-breaking space sits between “were” and “strong”. With Turn non-breaking and other odd spaces into normal spaces switched off, it stays, and the output keeps two spaces there. That is why the option is on by default.

Both tools paste into a plain text box (an HTML textarea, which the HTML standard defines as “a multiline plain text edit control”). Rich text loses its formatting as soon as you paste it in, and the tools run in your browser. For PDF text broken into short lines, see how to remove line breaks from PDF text. For hidden characters that survive every paste, see zero-width spaces and other invisible characters and the invisible character remover.

What plain-text paste keeps and loses

Kept	Lost
Letters, digits, punctuation, emoji	Font, size, color, highlight
Line breaks and paragraph breaks	Bold, italic, underline (Word’s Merge Formatting keeps these)
Tabs and repeated spaces	Link addresses (only the link text remains)
Invisible characters such as zero-width spaces	Images, and table structure in Word’s Keep Text Only
Bullets and numbers typed as characters	Bullets and numbering created by the list feature, in many apps

The last two rows explain most surprises. Invisible characters and odd spaces are text, not formatting, so they come through a plain-text paste unchanged. Clean them with the tools above. Automatic numbering is formatting, so a numbered list can arrive without its numbers. Check lists after pasting, and use Word’s Keep Source Formatting when the numbers matter.