You copy a paragraph from a web page or a chat window, paste it into a report, and that one section now has a different font, size and color from the rest of the document. Fixing it means reselecting the text and resetting the style by hand, and the problem comes back the next time you paste.
TL;DR: Ctrl+V keeps the original look, Ctrl+Shift+V brings in only the words, and the Paste Options button lets you switch after the fact.
The paste moves
- Ctrl+V pastes with the source formatting. Bold, italics and underline come along with the text.
- Ctrl+Shift+V pastes the text without its formatting. Use it for anything copied from a website or a messenger, so the document keeps its own styling.
- Right after pasting, a small Paste Options button with a (Ctrl) label shows up next to the text. Click it and pick Keep Source Formatting, Merge Formatting or Keep Text Only to change how that paste was applied.
These were checked by pasting into Word for the web.
Which one to reach for
Moving a styled block between two of your own documents is the case where plain Ctrl+V makes sense, because you usually want it to look the same.
For quotes, addresses or notes pulled from a browser, Ctrl+Shift+V saves a cleanup step.
If you are not sure, paste normally and then use the Paste Options button. Switching there is quicker than undoing and pasting again.
The surprise with "text only"
Pasting text only does not mean the text arrives with no formatting at all. It picks up whatever formatting is active at the cursor. If the character right before your cursor is bold, the plain-text paste comes in bold as well. Turn that formatting off first, then paste.
One more thing to know: older desktop versions of Word used Ctrl+Shift+V to paste formatting (the partner of Ctrl+Shift+C) rather than to paste plain text. If the shortcut does something unexpected on your machine, the Paste Options button gives you the same choice.
If you script Word instead
In Word VBA the plain-text paste is a single call:
Selection.PasteSpecial DataType:=wdPasteText
If you generate documents with python-docx, the issue mostly disappears, since each run only carries the formatting you set on it. The manual shortcuts above are for the everyday case where a person is assembling a document from several sources and wants it to look like one file.
This article was created with the help of AI. The steps come from our own test in Word for the web.
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