Copy and paste some text from a website and lose the formatting

We are going to work with some formatted text from our website. To do the same, launch a web browser and visit the Computeractive website. When the page loads, click on the News menu and then open one of the stories. Click and drag with the mouse pointer to highlight the text of the story – try to pick a story that has some embedded hyperlinks. Now right-click on the highlighted text and choose Copy from the pop-up menu. Launch Microsoft Word and right-click on the empty page and choose Paste from the pop-up menu. The text will appear, complete with links and any other formatting.

Being careful not to click anywhere else on the page first. This formatting can be quickly removed by first left-clicking on the little clipboard icon at the end of the text and then choosing Keep Text Only from the pop-up menu. This will discard all the formatting, keeping just the plain text.

But Word 2007 and 2010 users have a little more flexibility. Paste some text in from a website and left-click on the clipboard icon, as before. However, this time choose Set Default Paste from the pop-up menu. This opens Word’s Advanced Options dialogue box. Find the section entitled Copy, Cut and Paste. Now open the dropdown list next to the ‘Pasting from other programs’ option and choose Keep Text Only. From now on, all text pasted from anywhere (including websites) will display as plain text.