Today, we’re going to follow up our last post about opening Excel documents in their own windows with another tip on working with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office (specifically Word and Outlook).  This one has to do with pasting data into either a Microsoft Outlook email or a Microsoft Word document.  As you may know, sometimes it is necessary to copy material from the internet, another document, or some other source and paste it into the Word document or Outlook email you’re working on.  We certainly do a good bit of that here at Aries Multimedia since email is the primary way we communicate with clients.

If you copy data from one location and try to paste it into either Word or an Outlook email, you’ll notice that, by default, the data retains its formatting.  If you copy from a web page, Word and Outlook try their best to make the data look the same in your document or email as it does wherever it comes from. In our experience, we would much rather have the data look like the destination document rather than the source document.  Microsoft provides for this through the “Paste Special” command.

The “Paste Special” command is located on the Home toolbar in Word and the Message toolbar in the Outlook email editor.  If you click on the arrow under the “Paste” button, you’ll get the “Paste Special” menu.  At this point, you can choose to paste your data as “Unformatted Text” and the data will be formatted like the rest of the destination document or email.  This is more difficult and involves more steps, however, than the simple Ctrl+V keyboard shortcut.  In order to speed things along, we have made pasting as Unformatted Text the default.

If you want to make pasting as unformatted text your default, just click on the Office button in the upper left of the screen and click on “Word Options” (Word) or “Editor Options” (Outlook Email Editor).  Click on “Advanced” and scroll to “Cut, Copy, and Paste”.   Here, you have the option to Keep Source Formatting (the default option) or “Match Destination Formatting”.  I have changed all of my values to “Match Destination Formatting”.  Now, with the Ctrl+V keyboard shortcut, whatever we paste into Word or Outlook looks exactly like the rest of the document or message.  This is one of those small fixes that has ended up saving us a good bit of time.