It's not a bug at all, Dana.
For Excel to Word: I don't understand why you need things seen as text. If
that's the case, create the text in the Excel file, not in Word. Are you
pasting into a cell or into a textbox in Excel?
For Word to Word: Likely both documents are using the same style NAME with
different attributes. For instance, doc 1 has Heading 1 as bold and italic,
and doc 2 has it as green font. If you paste special--Unformatted, it'll
take on the destination formatting. See:

http://www.officearticles.com/word/p...oft_word.ht m

*******************
~Anne Troy

www.OfficeArticles.com


"Dana" wrote in message
...
I would like to format text in Word, using color, underline, italics, etc.
and paste it into an Excel cell without having the format changed or
removed.
I have turned off smart paste in Word, and was able to do it. However,
the
next time I tried, all the formatting was removed. I cannot figure out
what
was different between the two times. I do not want to paste as a Word
document object, because the characters need to be recognized at text.

I also sometimes have trouble pasting between two Word files. I want the
format to STAY THE SAME, not be changed by the program. This worked
several
years ago in Word, but the bug introduced in the late 90's has not been
fixed. Do any of you know how to avoid this problem?