How to Remove Formatting from Pasted Text in Word

The pasted paragraph arrived carrying the website's font, its blue underlined links, and a gray block of background shading. Word keeps the source formatting on a paste by default, and the styles in the destination document do not override it. Pasting as text, or changing that default, stops it at the point of arrival.

Paste as plain text with the keyboard

Press Ctrl + Shift + V (Mac: Cmd + Shift + V) instead of the usual paste shortcut. Current versions of Word treat this as paste text only, dropping fonts, colors, and links and letting the surrounding style take over.

Fix a paste that already landed

A small clipboard button appears at the end of freshly pasted text. Click it, or press Ctrl on its own to open it, and choose Keep Text Only, the clipboard icon with an A on it. The other icons keep the source formatting or merge the two, so pick the A. The button disappears once typing continues, and Ctrl + Z takes the paste back for a second attempt.

Make Keep Text Only the default

Click File, Options, Advanced, and scroll to Cut, copy, and paste. Four dropdowns cover pasting within the same document, pasting between documents, pasting between documents when styles conflict, and Pasting from other programs. Set the last one to Keep Text Only to strip formatting from browsers, email, and PDFs while leaving pastes inside Word alone.

Clear formatting from text already in the document

Select the text and press Ctrl + Spacebar to reset character formatting such as font, size, and color back to the underlying style. For a full reset that also drops paragraph styles, lists, and shading, click Home, Clear All Formatting, the eraser icon in the Font group.

Keep Text Only removes more than fonts. Hyperlinks become plain words, images are dropped, and a copied table arrives as lines of text rather than a grid. When the links or the table structure are needed, paste with Merge Formatting instead, which matches the destination styles but preserves the structure.

On Mac. The paste defaults live under Word, Preferences, Edit, in the Cut and paste options section rather than in the Options dialog.

Sources. Control the formatting when you paste text, Clear all text formatting.