I think you're more of a power whiner than a power user. In both
Word and Excel, click on Tools | Options | Edit | uncheck the
"Show Paste Options buttons" box | OK.

devinmckinney wrote:

Using Word and Excel 2003 on Windows.

In both Excel and Word recent versions have these little Paste Option square
graphics that appear when you paste text. When you click on the little
square, it pops up a menu of choices with radio buttons, about how you want
to handle formatting between source and target.

I hate them. On many levels. The concept of helping with moving formatting
from source to target is interesting, but I think that in Microsoft's zeal to
add features, they have sacrificed the basic use of the program in order to
serve a fairly sophisticated goal, and one that I believe doesn't serve all
of their users.

What's wrong with them? !) THEY BLOCK MY VIEW OF MY TEXT and 2) IT'S NOT
OBVIOUS HOW TO GET RID OF THEM. I have repeatedly been in a situation where I
am trying to do a series of cut and pastes, and literally have been unable to
read what I pasted in because of the icons that pop up. I find myself leaning
to the left or the right in a failed attempt to see behind them (I'm serious,
it's that bad sometimes).

When I try choosing all the radio button choices, none of them seem to
dismiss the graphic, at least in Word. In Excel I have come up with a
workaround that is to select some other text, in another cell, and sometimes
it seems that the little box disappears.

I move from computer to computer quite a bit, and so every time I use a new
one I come up against this. I think I've figured out how to turn them off on
my primary computer, but a little scouting here at a client has been
unsuccessful and so I'm frustrated.

Alternate implementations:

1. Just don't do it. Get rid of them. Bad UI, bad implementation to block my
view of my data. Ever. Stop the madness.
2. Make sure there is _always_ a "Turn this feature off" choice on the
dropdown. ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS. If there is a way to turn it off somewhere
else, I have sure been unsuccessful finding it - I can't even figure out what
the name of the offending little formatting boxes are to look them up in the
Help, let alone find where you turn them off.


In the end, this seems like a feature that is aimed at non-power users. I am
quite comfortable reformatting my text manually - it is possible Microsoft
has data from some of their less experienced users that they can't, and need
something like this. Even if I liked the feature, after I choose one of the
alternatives, the little boxes stay displayed, what's up with that??? Please
please please don't punish power users by making it hard to turn off the
training wheels! Especially when they interfere with the basic purpose of the
software, which is to enter text/numbers and then edit it.



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