Sep 21, 2017 If you are anything like me, I am sure you also hate copy-pasting text “with formatting.” You would always prefer to remove any traces of the original format and follow the format of the target document. So, let’s see how we can remove some of our frustration by eliminating the original format when we copy-paste in macOS Sierra. I am trying to paste a table from website into Excel 2016 for Mac without losing formatting. For example, some cells are filled in red on website, but when pasting to Excel, it does not carry that over, even when trying to paste special.
This tutorial screencast demonstrates how to paste without formatting on a Mac or a PC. Just add SHIFT to the keyboard shortcut for pasting:On a Mac: command shift vOn a PC: control shift v.This is a sample lesson from the online course 'Collect, Extract and Use Online Data Quickly and More Easily'.
Learn data extraction tools and techniques to get information from websites & other sources into useable, useful formats. Enroll today at:Looking for friendly, practical, jargon-free technology training? Visit my website at:Thanks for watching!- Kathleen, [email protected].
Thanks, I guess this is specific from one app to another. But some still do it odd. I just opened Open Office Spreadsheet that has text that is in Arial 10 Bold. I then opened Numbers and the entire page is set to Helvetica 10 Normal. I copy (CMD-C) and paste (CMD-P) from OO to Numbers and it comes out as Tahoma 10 Bold. BUT, numbers has a different paste called 'Paste & Match Style' which does bring it across as Arial 10 Bold.
But why does it change from Helvetica Normal to Tahoma Bold during a normal copy and paste? If they have a different command for Paste and Match format, you would assume the normal paste means, paste just the text.The worst offender is MAIL. There is no paste, paste special, etc.
So if you are composing an email that is copied from different sources (I often copy segments from spreadsheets, other emails, or websites) it changes the format of the email from that point on, where I just want the text. I normally just finish typing, open the font window and set everything back to normal.I was just hoping that there was some simple key sequence to only copy text and not the formatting.
But I guess not. You can create a simple 'service' using Automator, which you can then use to copy items with.
It won't work for copying in apps that don't support Services (Office, cough), but for copying stuff from Safari etc. It's fine.- Open Automator- Pick 'Service' from the suggested templates- Make sure the top line of text and pulldown menus on the right reads 'Service receives selected text in any application'- From the Library on the left, click Utilities, then locate and drag one 'Run Shell Script' from the list of Actions to the large workflow area on the right.- By default, it should offer to run 'cat', which is what we want. (This unixy utility, which you can also run from the Terminal, simply reads and writes text, but doesn't understand fancy formatting.)- From the list of Actions, drag a 'Copy to Clipboard' to beneath the 'Run Shell Script' action.- Save the service from File Save, naming it something like 'Copy unstyled' or such.Done. It takes the selected text, runs it through cat and blurts it out on the Clipboard ready to be pasted.This new service will appear as a shortcut in your right-click contextual menu, by itself or in a Services submenu. And in its real home is in the Application Services menu. From 'Services preferences' there, you can even assign a global keyboard shortcut for it. Finally, should you want to edit it, you'll find it saved in /Users/yourname/Library/Services/.