Plain-text paste, by application
| Application | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Most Windows applications | Ctrl + Shift + V |
| Most macOS applications | Command + Shift + V |
| Microsoft Word | Ctrl + Alt + V then choose Unformatted Text |
| Word on Mac | Command + Control + V |
| Google Docs | Ctrl + Shift + V or Command + Shift + V |
| Excel | Paste Special, Values, or Ctrl + Alt + V then V |
| Outlook | Ctrl + Shift + V |
| Slack and Teams | Ctrl + Shift + V |
| Figma and design tools | Ctrl + Shift + V pastes text without style |
Make it the default in Word
Word is where formatted paste causes the most damage, and it has a setting that removes the problem permanently. Go to File, Options,Advanced, and find the Cut, copy, and paste section.
Set Pasting from other programs to Keep Text Only. Consider setting the other three dropdowns the same way. From then on, an ordinaryCtrl + V pastes clean text and you never think about it again.
The trade-off is that you lose bold and italic when pasting from another document. UseCtrl + Alt + V in the rare cases where you want the formatting.
The case plain paste does not fix
If a symbol turns into a Latin letter when you paste it as plain text, the original was never a symbol. It was an ordinary letter displayed in the Symbol or Wingdings font, and stripping the formatting strips the only thing that made it look right.
There is no way to recover the intended character automatically, because the document never contained it. Replace it with the real Unicode character from the relevant page on this site. This is why Greek letters in Word recommends Alt+X over the Symbol font.
Invisible passengers
Copied text often carries characters you cannot see: non-breaking spaces, zero-width spaces, soft hyphens, and directional marks. They survive a plain-text paste because they are text.
They cause problems that look inexplicable. A search that finds nothing. A line that refuses to wrap. A CSV column that will not match. A password field that rejects a pasted password.
The text cleaner strips them, and the unicode inspectorshows you exactly what is there before you decide. For the characters themselves, seeinvisible and blank characters.
Pasting symbols into web forms and code
Two habits save a lot of debugging. Paste into a plain text editor first when the destination matters, so you can see exactly what you have. And prefer typing the HTML entity over pasting the character when writing markup, since an entity cannot carry hidden passengers.
If a pasted symbol arrives as a question mark rather than the wrong style, that is a different problem entirely and the character has been destroyed — seepasted symbol becomes a question mark.