Microsoft is Finally Changing Word's Annoying Default Paste Behavior (pcworld.com) 80
An anonymous reader shares a report: The default pasting behavior of Microsoft Word is a nightmare, and has been forever. If you want to add a text or image using the standard option, you can easily mess up the entire formatting in the text if a completely different font suddenly appears. After many years of complaints, Microsoft is finally listening to user feedback and changing the default behavior when pasting in Word.
From now on, the source's formatting will no longer be automatically retained. Instead, "Merge formatting" will be the new default for everyone, as Microsoft explained in a blog post this week. This means that after the update, newly pasted text will take on the font size, font type, and color of the text written in Word. However, special features such as lists or italicized elements will be retained. If you want these elements to be automatically adapted to the Word text, you must select the option "Keep text only."
From now on, the source's formatting will no longer be automatically retained. Instead, "Merge formatting" will be the new default for everyone, as Microsoft explained in a blog post this week. This means that after the update, newly pasted text will take on the font size, font type, and color of the text written in Word. However, special features such as lists or italicized elements will be retained. If you want these elements to be automatically adapted to the Word text, you must select the option "Keep text only."
Re:So they are making it worse? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So they are making it worse? (Score:5, Insightful)
For once they're making it better.
Hey Microsoft, while you are at it, can you make CTRL+F 'find' instead of 'foward' in Outlook?
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I so want to give you an upvote. If only I had mod points today. This behavior is one of the most f*cking infuriating things in my daily misery of using MS Software for work. What's even more annoying is that apparently it was b/c it was Billion Gates' preferred method for forwarding, carried over from some god forsaken email client he had used in the past. And we're still stuck with it 30+ years later.
Re:So they are making it worse? (Score:4, Funny)
Hey Microsoft, while you are at it, can you make CTRL+F 'find' instead of 'foward' in Outlook?
If you need to "find" something in an email sent to you, a better option would be to get up, walk to your colleague, slap them across the face and shout "brevity m*******er, do you speak it!"
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I definitely want brevity when I'm being given some very technical information about modifications to a jet engine or a nuclear reactor.
I'm not sure if you're trying to be facetious here, but if you are, that is *exactly* when you want brevity.
I still recall my university degrees and the stark contrast between them. At business school we got given an assignment. It usually had a minimum word count. At engineering school we also got given assignments, they had a *maximum* word count.
Re:So they are making it worse? (Score:4, Interesting)
No this is better.
But what they really need to do is start accepting pretty standard shortcuts such as ctrl+shift+v for paste text only and (not paste related) Ctrl+shift+z for redo.
I can't recall others off the top of my head but the shortcut situation across MS applications is a mess.
The paste options are inconsistent across word and Excel (and to get the equivalent of what is Ctrl+shift+v in almost every application it's Ctrl+v then Ctrl then a letter.
It's very clear that they most definitely do not use their own products. Especially outlook with it's painfully slow rendering engine.
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I would expect they use their own products, but they've been trapped in a backwards compatibility struggle for a long time with a lot of Office shortcuts. And some of those shortcuts were carryovers from things like Visicalc, WordPerfect, and other office applications that pre-dated MS Office applications. I believe in the last couple releases they've finally gotten away from some of the weird shortcuts to more standard ones (Like the infamous ctrl-F used to Forward a message instead of Find) but I'm sure t
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So they can have two modes of shortcuts.
Also, I doubt that things like the lack of Ctrl+a in the find dialogue is to preserve backwards compatibility.
It seems pretty clear they just don't care and are using momentum. I know it's hard to compete with free, but unless I'm at work or using large amounts of data I use Google sheets now. It just works better (I have Ms excel too, it's just painful to use).
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100% agree this shit needs to be standardized across applications and Operating Systems:
Something like:
* Ctrl-V Paste with formatting
* Ctrl-Shift-V Paste as unformatted text
* Ctrl-Shift-Alt-V Paste as HTML
Hey, it only took Microsoft a decade to "listen" to their customers. /s
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I would argue the ctrl-v and ctrl-shift-v are standard across applications, and if you accept command being the shortcut modified in MacOS also applications.
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some of us use
Ctrl-Ins and Shift-Ins
Re:So they are making it worse? (Score:4, Informative)
Speaking of Excel, it's the only app that, to this day, does not have a standard "clipboard" behavior. On just about every other app, you can make a selection, "copy", do whatever adjustments you just thought of in the document, then "Paste". Not Excel. It forgets what you copied as soon as you do anything else. After what... 40 years, they can't get this right?
I remember ClarisWorks 2.0, running on a 16MHz Macintosh LC, can copy and paste cells in a spreadsheet properly.
I mean, really?
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Yes!
I don't even use Excel that much and it's awkward copy behavior drives me nuts.
Aside from the dotten lines going away and ending the copy as you point out, the addition of a carriage return after copy of a cell is absolutely maddening.
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My favorite with CSV files.
Open file, change heading, save file with CTRL+S oops, now every zipcode in the north east and Puerto rico lost its leading zeros.
Whoever thought it would be a good idea to alter cells that weren't edited or touched in anyway deserves a special place in hell.
Somebody has to know that's a bad idea, and yet it remains not only as default, but forced behavior. They really need an option to open all cells as text for CSV and let me choose to switch them to numbers.
It doesn't even need
Re:So they are making it worse? (Score:5, Insightful)
After what... 40 years, they can't get this right?
Actually it is right. The default copy function of Excel is to take the selected cells. The idea of modifying them during this process breaks the immutable nature of the copy / paste process.
This is especially critical in an application like excel where the copied context is dependent on what is on the screen: the contents of the cell, the way cells are displayed (including conditional formatting), the layout and order of the cells, and whether the cells are visible at all.
Copy and Paste would be truly broken if the cells selected are retained and then pasted with a mixture of updates - do you keep the original or updated data, do you keep the original or updated displayed cells, do you keep the original or updated order.
If you copy *contents* of cells in Excel it doesn't ever deselect it because the people who thought about this were clever enough to understand that you shouldn't break clipboard immutability.
I use Calc and Sheets, and it's copy/paste infuriates me.
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But I'm not talking about editing the copied cells. I'm talking about touching cells that were neither source nor destinations nor dependencies thereof.
Given that other spreadsheets have done it, it is not impossible. I can understand the copy selection being cancelled if a potentially damaging change is made to the source or its dependencies. (They should be able to figure this out when they recalculate the sheet).
Simple cell content copied from Cell A to be pasted into Cell B should not be "forgotten"
Now can they make pasting pictures work (Score:2)
Good.
Now: could they please make it so that if you paste a PICTURE the formatting doesn't go all wonky?
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My personal favorite, a very common shortcut in terminals is "Ctrl-Shift-C" for copy (because Ctrl-C is taken). While that isn't universal in meaning, it's generally doing something innocuous in other applications.
Except Microsoft Teams, where it is "Immediately call everyone on the active chat no matter what without confirmation". I've had *so* many surprise "voice meetings" started by people accidentally hitting ctrl-shift-c.
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CTRL-[ and CTRL-] (for changing font size) work properly in half their apps and not at all in the other ones. Grrrrr.
Mac (Score:5, Informative)
On Mac, even when explicitly attempting to paste without formatting, Word somehow overrides this functionality and pastes with formatting. It's infuriating.
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OK, so why do the OS key combos not do the same thing ?
Formatting is always introduced or inherited.
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Ctrl-shift-v. Presumably there is a Mac equivalent.
Works in many apps.
Hoping this fixes it (Score:4, Insightful)
I've found their default copy-and-paste behavior to be utterly perplexing and annoying. When copy-and-paste something into a document, I rarely want (or need) original formatting, just the text. I feel like that should be the default action, anything else should be optionally selected.
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perplexing and annoying
no, its way worse than that, its a *NIGHTMARE* (the horrors)
Re:Hoping this fixes it (Score:5, Informative)
I just paste whatever into notepad, then select all and copy there. THEN I can paste into Word without screwups.
Re:Hoping this fixes it (Score:4, Informative)
Or install the free PureText app. Strips the clipboard in situ.
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Or hold the Alt key down as you press Ctrl+V. But sure a whole separate program with hooks into the OS clipboard works too.
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You solve a tiny little slice of the problem. PureText solves it for every clipboard function.
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Usually, when pasting from other sources, I *do* want some formatting, such as bold/italic and superscript. Plain text paste doesn't do that.
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I just paste whatever into notepad, then select all and copy there. THEN I can paste into Word without screwups.
There's literally a button in Word to post text only. There's even a keyboard shortcut ALT+CTRL+V which does what you want.
It never ceases to amaze me how people make things difficult for themselves simply by not spending 30 seconds to Google if there's a solution to their problem. How many cumulative hours of your life have you wasted jumping into Notepad unnecessarily?
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Nope, it does not. It gives me a "Paste Special" dialog, where options are typically "Unformatted text", "HTML format" or "Unformatted unicode text". Which by default is set to "HTML", so I have to move that selection around.
So...no, you are wrong, there is no button to directly post "text only". In MS Teams they *do* have shift+ctrl+v, but it doesn't work on Word.
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My standard practice is to copy to the clipboard, paste into Notepad, copy from Notepad, paste into receivig document.
All formattig gone :)
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Yeah this has been my standard practice as well.
Needing strip out all of the style information that gets pasted as well.
Nothing like pasting some text and then realising that your now have multiple style of paragraphs, bullets, and worse numbering. And with no means of actually stripping out these now useless styles from the document they will haunt you forever. Slowly infecting your entire library of documents over time. You end up being the style police with you co-workers. Clean style documents mak
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Yes, as others have noted, it must be cut and pasted to some separate app to remove the formatting.
I had the worst time with Libreoffice when it would convert my USPS tracking numbers into... something else. At some point, they finally allowed me to enter a number as a text field. Now I can enter my tracking numbers without them being mutilated.
Going back to the subject, when I want to copy and paste some text, I expect and want ASCII text! I DO NOT WANT some crappy formatting in my reply. If only I could h
Too late (Score:4, Insightful)
It would have been great if they had done this 20+ years ago. Now all this will do is break everyone's long-established workarounds.
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OK, now you are just complaining in order to complain. Let them have this one! Yes, it should have been fixed a long time ago, but many other text editors behave exactly the same, so it was not obvious that they'd fix it.
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Point taken. I note that this is a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation, anything they do will piss someone off.
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Now all this will do is break everyone's long-established workarounds.
Workarounds are for people who don't learn to use software. There was a function (including keyboard shortcut) that did this already. Alt+Ctrl+V. And that "workaround" still works after the default behavioral change.
We should never design software to suit the lowest common denominator of a user who never bothered to understand how the software worked in the first place. If your workaround got broken, sorry but screw you, don't stand in the way of progress. God knows this is the first time Microsoft may have
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We should never design software to suit the lowest common denominator of a user who never bothered to understand how the software worked in the first place.
Microsoft has consistently tried to present a user interface model where the user doesn't have to understand how the software works. The idea is that if you need someone to explain it to you, the UI engineer has failed. As much as we like to pillory Microsoft for bad design decisions, UI is one of the few aspects of their design that they've actua
Libreoffice (Score:2)
Libreoffice. :)
It won't brake that workaround
Depending on source (Score:2)
I think it really depends on the source of the copied text. If I'm copying from a web page, I don't want to maintain any of the formatting from the original webpage. But if I'm copying from one part of a document to another part of the document, then it should probably keep the formatting it had when I originally copied it.
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I definitely think their merge formatting is a better choice. If copying something with bold or italic among the words I would want that to carry.
Keyboard shortcut (Score:2)
I kept notepad on hand (Score:5, Insightful)
to paste and recapture the actual text instead of directly pasting. It's annoying.
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Unfortunately, that option doesn't preserve bold/italics or superscripts. For this reason, I changed the Word default paste option years ago.
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Why would you do that when there's a keyboard shortcut to paste in Word that does this without the extra clicking, extra key presses, and running of another program? Alt+ctl+v
Now do CTRL-SHIFT-V for Plain Text Paste in Excel (Score:3)
Never, in my decades of using spreadsheets, have I ever wanted HTML formatting to follow what I copy and paste across cells. I don't even care that it's the default behaviour! For the love of $deity just put a $FSCKing keyboard shortcut for plain text paste in Excel. You'll save folks CENTURIES in time vs. all the clicks to do it with the stupid icons on the stupid right-click menu. Folks have written VS Scripts that break every few versions of Excel just to do this. Why is this so hard? OO.org had this two decades ago! While you're at it, make this the default for all MS applications!
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That's wild.
I know some secretaries who switched to ooo when Microsoft did The Ribbon and never looked back.
It hadn't occurred to me this might still be a Word misfeature.
I thought Word 5.1 for Mac was close to ideal tho.
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Word for Windows 2.0 baby. Did 99% of what I needed in a word processor, and did it thirty years ago.
From double-click to ready for typing in about 1 second on a 486DX2-66.
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I thought Word 5.1 for Mac was close to ideal tho.
Blashphemy! In those days it was ClarisWorks or broke! ;)
word 5.1 (Score:2)
word 5.1 and excel 4, Mac, were the last products out of Redmond that I saw any reason to buy (and I did).
At the time, Word on the Mac and Word for dos had *nothing* in common other than the name.
Well, they could *kind of* read one another's files--but you lost things like inserted charts in the process!
The Mac Word was the best available at the time (unless you needed certain things like WP), while the DOS/Windows version was a distance third, propped up only by the lack of a viable fourth.
Word 6, though,
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And while they're at that, can they get rid of the flamingly stupid "feature" where Excel "helpfully" automagically changes text that is in hh:mm:ss format (hours, minutes, seconds) to a date? Not the layout of the data, but actually CHANGES it, even in a CSV! With no way to disable it!
I have an export of time elapsed for a report that I do, and I was forced to install LibreOffice at work to actually get what I need (I use it at home). So many years ago I wanted to switch us to OpenOffice, but noooo...
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Yep, Excel copy/paste is stupid. As for CSV, Excel uses the formatted values. The original datetime values is there, it just doesn't export it to CSV that way.
You might try formatting the spreadsheet, or the column, as TEXT first, then paste. Sometimes that helps preserve the value as you would want it to.
"Finally", also CTRL + V (Score:1)
Re:"Finally", also CTRL + shift + V (Score:2)
Now do ctrl+tab MRU switching in Edge (Score:1)
I know goddamn google in goddamn chrome doesn't have it either, but...
So Melinda is leaving the Gates Foundation... (Score:3)
And now they announce Word's paste behavior is getting fixed? Wow, I didn't realize it was all Melinda's doing!
Ultra smug LibreOffice user on Ubuntu here (Score:3, Informative)
Ultra smug LibreOffice user on Ubuntu here and I have no clue what ya'll are talking about, but it sounds miserable. Why do you live like that, (aside from your paycheck of course)?
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LibreOffice: When the UI gives you a *choice* of "1998" or ribbon-style, or several variations of both. Choice? What madness is this?
There are actually seven options for the user interface, available via "view"->"user interface".
And yeah, I guess this isn't very well-known, with the "traditional" version being the default.
Bullet points (Score:2)
Notepad as intermediary for decades (Score:3)
Pasted text can still crap on your document (Score:4, Interesting)
There are still a lot of ways pasted text could crap all over your document, mainly having to do with styles. Note in the linked article this only affects text pasted in from other applications -- that sounds like if it comes from Word, you're still subject to the old rules.
If the text you're pasting in has the SAME styles as your document, you're golden: Heading 1 in the old doc should get formatted like heading 1 where you paste it. That's good.
But if you're using a custom template that uses "PDQ Heading 1" and "PDQ Body" and what you're pasting from uses "WWF Heading 1" and "WWF Body", you're going to have those styles contaminating your document. If the text you're copying has corrupt style names, e.g. ",,Chapter,Heading 1" -- which admittedly doesn't happen as much as it used to -- that pink slime ends up in your document and is very hard to clean out.
I've written "Paste Safely" code (a couple times, each redeveloped from scratch) that looks at a list of known styles and how to translate them, pastes into a "quarantine" doc, translates styles, then copies pastes into your doc.
Raw paste should be the default everywhere. (Score:2)
I would like raw copy-paste to be implemented as the default in all software. It's about the context. If I'm copying something from A to B, I would nearly always expect the content to be adjusted to the target context, and not the other way around. This gets even more obvious if you consider multiple sources. Imagine you have sources A, B, C and D all with different formatting style. If you copied a bit of information from every one of these sources to a target document E, you'd end up with a Frankenstein o
tremendous benefit for companies (Score:4, Insightful)
I was able to pick up a document constructed by a bunch of people using cut-and-paste and establish it was not produced through a coherent intellectual process. Part of the evidence was how various parts of the document had different formatting, sometimes on the same page, showing the mechanics how the document was produced, as well as the semantics that Part A of the document in one format did not fit with Part B in another format.
One of my favorites (in a document formally delivered for which payment was expected) said to paraphrase. "The name of software component shall prevent kinetic damage to the computer system." (The actual text was a paragraph or two, but that was what it basically said. This was in a section of material that had no relevance to a software-only product, cut from a different hardware-oriented system specification. There was a bunch of other hardware-related stuff, like electrical connections.) In my review, I challenged the contractor who wrote that. "How does the software do this? Does it enable the force field around the hardware? Or did you cut-and-paste that from a different document from a previous hardware project?" One engineer admitted privately it was the latter, but on the record the company said "Thank you for your comments. We will be revising and resubmitting this deliverable." (This was provided by a company that has been in the news lately for crashing/missing/falling parts, etc. on their primary product line. ) In another instance, the same document said "The name of software component shall recycle bytes, and shall make use of recycled bytes, to the maximum extent feasible." That was in a draft document provided to me for review. The guy who wrote that told me, "I inserted that to see if you, or anyone else, actually read this document." So he removed that from the delivered document, and we got a good laugh out of it. (This happened 20 years ago, but from what I've seen, it's still a problem in my former industry.)
So companies that construct contract deliverables through a bunch of monkeys "reusing text" from other documents will be thrilled by this new "feature." For those of us who conduct document forensics on such deliverables, this is a sad day.
Whats next? Atlassian allows to disable emoticons? (Score:2)
The World is getting a better place after all.
Excel Temporary Clipboards (Score:2)
That is far less annoying than Excels temporary clipboard.
I hate how if you copy something, then edit another cell, the clipboard ends. If you don't paste immediately you need to start all over.
That has been one of the more annoying Office bugs.
Outside of the fact that OneNote doesn't follow any of the editing functionality of Word, given the fact that OneNote is basically just word with tabs and pages
Re: Excel Temporary Clipboards (Score:1)
ctrl+shift+f (Score:2)
Does Word not support ctrl+shift+f to paste without formatting? I thought this was standard. Attempting to keep the original formatting is something that most rich text tools support, and holding shift when pasting removes it.
I didn't even know that this was a problem that existed.
Sigh (Score:2)
Can they now fix that you can't Ctrl-Shift-V into Outlook at all? But yet there's a menu item right there to paste without formatting.
Hello, support? I have a problem. (Score:2)
OK but (Score:3)
Microsoft recently changed Word's behavior so that when you open a document to which you do not have write access, it pops up a little message in a word bubble (like in a comic book) that says you can't edit it, and you have to acknowledge it before you can do anything else. This change occurred within the last year.
My employer retains knowledge in Word documents. When I open one of these documents I used to just hit ^F and search to find the part in the document that I wanted. Now I have to acknowledge the notice before I can do that.
Nobody wanted this "feature". Just put the bar across the top of the document like you do in Excel, Office developer assholes.
Maybe someday ... (Score:1)
Great! And while you're at it could you remove that idiot assistant that keeps popping up "helpful suggestions" and stealing focus -- while I'm typing?
Oh, and the equation editor in Word. And tables in Word. And the 47,000 other stupid things in Office that keep us from getting our work done.
If you work hard, and occasionally think about the user, maybe someday you can be as efficient and useful as LibreOffice.
Only 40 years (Score:3)
It only took them 40 years to do what was obvious to anyone with a brain.