When I paste text in an Office document such as Word or Excel (or anywhere
text attributes are supporetd), the text always retains the attributes of
the source document unless I use Paste Special.

It seems to me that I hardly ever want to paste in this way. I normally
want to have the text adopt the attributes of the destination document and
it's very frustrating to have to use Paste Special, then select Plain Text,
then click OK every time I want to paste in this way rather than just
hitting Ctrl. V.

It's particularly annoying when copying and pasting between messages in
Outlook as gives unpredictable results that are rarely what I want. And, of
course, Outlook
doesn't have a Paste Special option which means that to paste just the text,
I have to open Notepad, paste in the text, copy it again, then paste it
where I want it.

I guess I can work around the problem and create special short-cuts, but I'd
need to do this in every program and this is not really a workable solution.
Is it not possible to have the default paste action for all Windows programs
paste just the text without the attributes? Maybe a registry edit?

Does anybody know why this is the default behaviour? I find it difficult to
believe that the way I work is different to anybody else and can't imagine
why this is the default behaviour.

--

Jonathan Finney

Finney