Something that bugged me for a long time on a Mac was the copy/paste behavior. I always wanted it to default to match the formatting of the document I am working in, or even paste in unformatted text. Pasting formatted text just messes up your whole document. I never knew how to do this until I recently saw a tweet about it. As I received a question about it today I figured I would write a short blog as the original post on this topic is difficult to find. I do want to point out that all credits for this trick go to user “BAT”, and of course thanks to Rob Nolen for tweeting this!
So how do you “change” the default “paste” option? Well, you don’t really, but you can configure a shortcut and set it to call a menu item. You do this as follows:
- Open System Preferences
- Go to Keyboard
- Click Shortcuts
- Add an “App Shortcut”
- Select “Microsoft Word” as the app
- Use the following as the “Menu Title”: Paste and Match Formatting
- And in the keyboard shortcut use the key combination COMMAND-V
Now you have created a shortcut that maps to the “paste and match formatting” menu item. Which is very very handy! Thanks Rob and BAT for sharing this, you saved me from a lot of frustration.