Best Way to Copy and Paste Text Between Programs

If you need to copy and paste large blocks of highly formatted copy from Word (or a Web page) to another program (such as an online html editor or an email message), you may want to remove all that erroneous code first. Otherwise you end up with wacky font sizes, colors and odd paragraph spacing.

Get to know the simple Notepad program that comes with Windows. You'll find it under your start menu. Search under "all programs" and then "accessories". When you locate the program, drag and drop the icon from the start menu to your taskbar or desktop so it will be easier to locate when you need it next.

Open Notepad. Copy and paste all your highly formatted text content into Notepad to remove all the formatting. Then copy and paste the text back out of Notepad and into its final resting place to get clean content.

Here's an example:
Say you want to copy and paste the text from a PR that was provided to you as a Word file or a PDF into an online html editor (cms) for your website. If you go right from Word to HTML editor, you're going to get a mess of line breaks, indents, and font formatting that may not match the layout of the website where the content is needed. So, instead, copy and paste the text you want out of Word or the PDF and into Notepad first. This will clear out all that erroneous code you don't want. Then copy and paste the clean text out of Notepad and into your online html editor. You'll get much better results!

One thing Notepad doesn't do well is remove paragraph breaks. If you have ever had to manually remove paragraph breaks from a long page of copied text you know what a pain this can be! But I have found a quick way to remove unwanted paragraph breaks using Word.

Since you probably got all those paragraph breaks by copying and pasting content from a PDF or webpage -- go ahead and copy and paste the ugly content, littered with paragraph breaks every 65 characters, into a clean Word document. Then find Word's editing toolbar and click on Find/Replace. Select "Find" and then click the "More" button. Click the "Special" dropdown and select "Paragraph Mark". Click on "Replace" and leave it blank. Click "Replace All". All the paragraph breaks will be removed, leaving one continuous copy block!

Nice!