Every Gmail user has dealt with this annoyance: you’re writing an email, you copy and paste some text from another page, and the text’s formatting comes along for the ride. It’s not the end of the world, but then everything you type after that is formatted the same. Ugh. So now you do what? Keep the formatting? Switch to composing in plain text? Hunt for Gmail’s default font and size?
You’ve got a couple of options:
- If you’re using Chrome, you should get familiar with the Ctrl+Shift+V keyboard shortcut (Cmd+Shift+V on OS X). It pastes text in Chrome without formatting, plain and simple. If you want to keep the formatting for your pasted text without hassling with weird formatting after you paste, then the next option is for you.
- You start using the Strike Formatting button in Gmail. It’s the button on the far right of the toolbar that looks like T×, and it does exactly what you’d expect: removes all the formatting from selected text and resets the styling to Gmail’s default.
There’s nothing fancy about this, I admit — these are default features built into Chrome/Gmail. But I’ve been growing more and more irritated by copy-and-paste formatting frustrations in Gmail lately, mostly because I’d forgotten about these options. I figure I’m probably not the only one, so it might help you out, too!
You could also just switch to Plain Text for all your emails. I used to be staunchly plain-text, but email is enough of a pain as it is; using rich formatting can help clarify your text, and a well-placed animated GIF never hurts, either.
Alternately, you could use a helper app like Better Paste for Windows (strips text formatting when you paste) or previously mentioned FormatMatch for Mac OS X.
Shortcut of the Day highlights a great shortcut on various platforms from the desktop to mobile devices to the web. You can find more shortcuts here.
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