The shortcut, by app and OS
"Paste as plain text" (sometimes labeled "paste without formatting") tells the destination to drop the source's fonts, colors, and links and keep only the characters. The key combination depends on the operating system and, in a few cases, the specific app.
| App / platform | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Windows & ChromeOS (most apps, browsers) | Ctrl+Shift+V |
| macOS (most apps, browsers) | Cmd+Shift+V |
| macOS Apple apps (Pages, Mail, Notes, TextEdit) | Cmd+Option+Shift+V ("Paste and Match Style") |
| Google Docs, Sheets, Slides | Ctrl+Shift+V (Cmd+Shift+V on Mac) |
| Gmail & Slack | Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+V |
| Microsoft Word | No default — paste, then Ctrl for "Keep Text Only" |
| VS Code, Notepad, plain-text editors | Ctrl/Cmd+V (already plain text) |
Google documents its shortcuts directly: Google Docs keyboard shortcuts. Apple lists the system-wide combination, including Paste and Match Style, in its Mac keyboard shortcuts reference. Microsoft explains Word's paste-options menu — and how to set "Keep Text Only" as the default instead of hunting for it after every paste — in Control the formatting when you paste text.
Why the shortcut still leaves text "weird"
A plain-text paste removes exactly one layer: rich formatting. Font family, size, color, bold, links — all discarded. What it does not touch is the character data itself, and a lot of what makes pasted text misbehave is characters, not formatting: non-breaking spaces (U+00A0), zero-width spaces (U+200B), directional marks, soft hyphens from PDFs, and the curly quotes and em dashes that rich editors substitute automatically. Every one of those survives Ctrl+Shift+V untouched, because to the operating system they are letters, not styling.
That gap is exactly what trips people up — searching for a word that "looks" right but isn't found, a headline that won't wrap where expected, or a stray gap that resists the delete key. The full explanation of where each artifact comes from is in why does my text paste weird, and the character-level fix — as opposed to the formatting-level one a keyboard shortcut gives you — is what a text sanitizer is for.
When the shortcut is unreliable or missing
Three situations come up often enough to plan around:
- The app has no shortcut at all. Word is the main example — there is no built-in Ctrl+Shift+V for plain text, only the paste-options menu that appears after a normal paste, or a shortcut you assign yourself to the PasteTextOnly command.
- The option is greyed out. If the clipboard already holds plain text — copied from a terminal, a .txt file, or another plain-text field — there is nothing to strip, so the app disables the option rather than doing nothing silently.
- The shortcut strips formatting but not the actual problem. When the complaint is hidden characters, AI watermark spaces, or copy-paste artifacts from a chatbot rather than fonts and colors, a plain-text paste won't fix it no matter how reliably the key combination works. Pasting AI output specifically into Word or Docs has its own set of gotchas, covered in pasting AI text into Word and Google Docs.
For all three, the fallback that works regardless of which app or OS you're on is the same: paste the text into a character-level cleaner first, then paste the cleaned result into the destination. Running it through CleanPastedText catches what the keyboard shortcut can't, entirely in your browser.