Sniffing Paste

Copying from a web page and pasting into a Word document will usually copy not only the data but also the yucky web page formatting.  Most times when I paste data, I just want the data, not the formatting.  For some time I've been using a trick to get around this, using applications that are unaware of formatting as a clipboard filter.  For example, pasting into the Windows Run dialog (Ctrl+C, Win+R, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Esc, Alt+Tab, Ctrl+V), or into Notepad for larger buffers.  These tricks do get rid of the formatting, but they are frickin' tedious.  Some apps do have a "Paste Special" option that I could use instead, often accessible with Ctrl+Shift+V.  But, some don't (Word 2007, I'm looking at you).

Word to your Mother

So I wrote a quick and dirty tool to take care of that problem, with MS Word, and with anything else.  I call it StripClip, and all it does is go get the contents of the clipboard and put them back again as plain text.  Here's an example, where the first paragraph was pasted directly (see the formatting?) and the second was filtered through stripclip:

How?

Simple.  Just scrape the code sample from MSDN and you're off:

 1 // Adapted from:
 2 // https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/kz40084e%28v=vs.110%29.aspx
 3 using System;
 4 using System.Windows.Forms;
 5 
 6 class Unformat
 7 {
 8     [STAThreadAttribute]
 9     static public void Main()
10     {
11         try
12         {
13             StripClipFormatting();
14         } catch (Exception) { }
15     }
16 
17     static public void StripClipFormatting()
18     {
19         String text = Clipboard.GetText(TextDataFormat.Text);
20         Clipboard.SetText(text, TextDataFormat.Text);
21     }
22 }

(Also available here)

Shortcutting

To make this convenient, build a copy of it using the C# compiler and stick a shortcut to the resulting executable on your desktop, taking care to set up a shortcut key for the shortcut, as follows:

I favor Ctrl+Shift+C, because it's mnemonically close to Ctrl+C (copy).  But you can do whatever you want.  Enjoy!