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06 September 2012
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Q. I am writing up a report and need to paste text from several different Word documents. They all have different formatting and when I paste some text, everything goes wild. Any advice?

A. There are different opinions on how to manage this common problem. My approach is to use a text editor as an intermediate step. I copy from Document A, paste the text into a text editor to remove all the formatting and then copy and paste from the text editor into Document B, which has the formatting I require. It slows things down a bit but maintains the formatting and does not throw up surprises when printing.

Examples of text editors are Notepad in Windows and TextEdit in Mac.

Another way to do this is to paste directly from Document A into Document B and click on the 'Paste Options' icon that appears when you paste the text. This allows you to choose the source or the destination formatting.

It gets complex with tables, lists and pictures, in which case the first method, using a text editor, may save you time in the long run.

Remember the keyboard shortcuts for copy and pasting: Control + C will copy selected text and Control + V will paste selected text. On a Mac use the Command key (cmd) rather than the Control key.