How to paste without formatting in any app
There is no single way to paste without formatting on Windows. Ctrl+Shift+V works in some apps and does nothing in others, Word hides its option under Paste Options, and the old trick of pasting into Notepad and copying again costs a detour every time. Clipboard Formatting Remover fixes it at the source: it removes the formatting the moment you copy, so a normal Ctrl+V pastes plain text wherever you are.
Grab a paragraph from a news site, a newsletter or a shared report, and the fonts, colors, sizes, embedded links and inline pictures are gone before you paste. The words themselves are untouched, and nothing is added to them. Pictures and files you copy are left exactly as they are, and anything a password manager marks as private is skipped.
Open the panel from the tray and your latest copy is shown on a page, alongside a tally of today's cleanups and the number of trackers stripped. Clicking the page cleans the clipboard on demand, which is how it works if you turn Clean every copy off.
Keep formatting in Word and Outlook only
Sometimes you do want the styles, for instance when moving a table between documents. Under Keeps formatting in, Word and Outlook (both OUTLOOK.EXE and the new olk.exe) are listed from the start. Whenever one of them is the active window, you paste the styled original. Bring a browser, a chat app or a web form forward and the next paste is plain once more.
To change the list, open Settings and find Paste formatted in. Add an app takes a name and its program file, such as WINWORD.EXE; remove the defaults and every app gets plain text.
A link cleaner for tracking parameters
Links copied from emails, social posts and search results often carry a tail of tracking tags. With Scrub links on, which is the default, those tags are removed from every address you copy: all utm_ tags, fbclid, gclid, msclkid and the rest of the 27 kinds it knows. Wrapped links from Outlook SafeLinks and Google, Facebook and Instagram redirects are unwrapped to the real destination, so the link you share is the one people will actually visit. Every tag taken out adds to the trackers removed count in the panel, so you can see how much tracking your copies were carrying.
Copy text from the screen and remove line breaks
Press Ctrl+Alt+S and an overlay appears with the prompt Box the text you want. Drag around words in a video, a photo, a dialog box or a scanned PDF and the words are copied as unformatted text, read by the text recognition built into Windows. Esc or a right-click cancels.
Text pulled from PDFs and screenshots often arrives with a hard break at the end of every line and doubled spaces. Switch on the Tidy option in Settings and those breaks are joined back into sentences and the extra spaces squeezed out.
