How To Paste Without Styles or Formatting on a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use Paste and Match Style on your Mac. 

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So when you Copy and Paste text from one document to another, or one app to another, you not only get the text but you get the styling of the text. Whether it is bold, italic, underline, the font, the color, and so on. But sometimes you don't want that. Sometimes you're already using a specific style in the document you're working on and when you paste the text you want it to follow along with that style. You don't want to use the style from the other document. 

For instance, say I have some text here in TextEdit. You can see here the text is Arial, Bold, 24 pt. If I were to Copy it and then want to Paste that text into an email message I would go here and put my text cursor at the end and then Paste. However, notice that this is Helvetica, 24 pt. and not bold. So if I paste here what happens. Well, I get the text and the styling that comes over. So this text is Arial 24 bold whereas this is Helvetica 24, not bold. So if your intention was to keep the styling then you need to use a different command than the regular paste. 

If you look in the Edit menu you'll see Paste. But you'll also see Paste and Match Style. Where it appears in the Edit menu depends on which app you're using. I'm going to use this here. Notice there's a keyboard shortcut. When I use that notice it follows along with the style from where the text cursor was. So when the text cursor was here you can see it was Helvetica 24 and when I pasted with Paste and Match Style it just kept going at Helvetica 24 just as if I was typing new text. Now this converts all of the text. So if in TextEdit here I instead had some text that was one color and italic and a different size, if I were to copy this and then do a regular paste into mail, with Command V, you could see it keeps all of that styling. So that's very useful. But if I were to use Paste and Match Style it just follows along with the exact styling of what I was using before. 

So in the past this has been called Paste Plain Text because what you're actually doing is pasting plain text stripped of all styles, so the styling from the current document is what is used just as if you had typed new text. It works this way in many different apps. For instance, here in TextEdit there's Edit and Paste, and then you can see Paste and Match Style right under it. Here I am in Pages and you could see it's Edit and then also Paste and Match Style right underneath paste. The same keyboard shortcut. You're adding Option and Shift to the Command V. So if I were to do a regular paste here you could see how it keeps all the styling from my TextEdit document. But if I were to use Paste and Match Style it picks up from the exact style that was being used right there where the text cursor was. So, if I were to, instead, put the text cursor right here after this first word notice that the style here is Bold, Italic, Underlined. The text color is blue. So now if I were to use Paste and Match Style it follows along with that just as if I was typing starting right here at this point. 

So this may work differently in third party apps. So, for instance, here in Microsoft Word if I were to do a regular paste of what I had copied in TextEdit you could see it does bring along all of the colors and fonts and sizes, and all of that. If I look in the Edit menu I can see Paste and I can see Paste and Match Formatting. But that works a little differently. You could see here that it actually keeps the bold here and italic, but the font and the size have been taken from what I was using in the document before. However, if I go to Edit, Paste Special I can paste unformatted text. Now it is going to paste plain text there, meaning it is going to pick up all of the formatting and styling from the text that was there before. 

Now if all else fails another way to do this is to convert to Plain Text using a plain text document as a go-between. So I'm going to select all of this text here. It's got colors and styles and all of that. I'm going to Copy. Then in TextEdit I'm going to create a new document. Now I want to make sure this new document is using plain text. If I go to Format I should see Make Rich Text. Meaning to convert it to Rich Text because right now it is Plain Text. I have TextEdit set so that plain text is the default for creating new documents. So, if I were to paste in here, of course, plain text can't use any of that styling. It's just plain text. So all of the styling and colors are stripped. Now I can select this text here in the Plain Text document. Copy that and when I go to another app, like Mail, and paste of course it just pastes plain text. The text in the Clipboard has no memory of the styling from before because that was removed when I pasted it into TextEdit and copied it from there. So you always have that option if all else fails. 

Often Clipboard Managers also allow you to paste plain text. So, for instance, here I've got that text from Pages here. If I wanted to paste it as Plain Text I could use this right here. But also in my own Clip Tools app. If I were to use this you can see if I pasted it in as Rich Text with all the styling. But instead if I were to hold down the Shift and Control keys you can see it gives me the ability to paste plain text. So now when I use this you could see the text just pastes in and since it has no styling it follows the styles from before. 

One last tip here. If you want to see if the Clipboard actually contains plain text or text with styling you can just look at the Clipboard. I'm going to copy this here, I'm going to go to the Finder and under Finder I can go to Edit and Show Clipboard. You could see here in the Clipboard all the styling and it even show here at the bottom that it is Rich Text.

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.