When in Microsoft Word to paste some text, you can right-click and get a few options regarding how the content you paste in will be formatted. It can keep source formatting (how it originally looked), merge the formatting, or paste just the text in. In all cases that I can recall, I have wanted the text to inherit the formatting of the document it is being pasted into. I’m not sure why “Keep Source Formatting” is the default option because it doesn’t seem useful to me.
The easy way around this is to right click and choose the clipboard icon with the letter A on it to “Keep text only”. While it is easy enough, it gets annoying that I can’t use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+V to paste in how I want. Fortunately, there’s a way to change the default behavior and it isn’t too difficult.
On the Home tab, you will also find a big Paste button. If you click the icon, it will copy the text in with the default Paste method. If you click the arrow pointing down below it, that will give you the other options. Also on that menu is a menu to ‘Set Default Paste…’ Click that and it will take you into your Word Options.
The Default Paste… menu takes you to the Advanced tab of the Word Options. With a section for Cut, copy, and paste, you can set the default paste behavior in various context. Pasting within the same document, pasting between documents, pasting between documents when style definitions conflict, and pasting from other programs. Here, I set Pasting from other programs to “Keep Text Only”. This way, if I copy a snippet of text from a website and paste it into a Word document, it will drop its previous formatting and will look like the document I’m pasting into.
I hit OK on the Word Options and closed/re-opened Microsoft Word. I tested it out and the text I pasted in no longer held its original formatting and instead matched the rest of the document.