Why does Outlook text paste badly?
Email is HTML, and Outlook copies that HTML to the clipboard along with the text. Classic Outlook for Windows uses Word's engine to display messages, so text copied from an email behaves much like text copied from Word: styles, curly punctuation and non-breaking spaces all come along.
| Symptom | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Wrong font or colour in the destination | Rich formatting on the clipboard | Keep Text Only, or Ctrl+Shift+V |
| Gaps that trim and search miss | Non-breaking spaces (U+00A0) | Cleaner, "Exotic spaces" rule |
| Curly quotes in code or a form | Typographic characters in the text | Cleaner, "Typography" rule |
| Huge rewritten URLs | Link rewriting by the mail system | Use the original link |
Clean the text in three steps
- Copy from the email and paste into the destination as plain text. The shortcut for each app is in the paste-as-plain-text guide.
- For anything that must be exact, such as a code snippet, order number or address, paste into the cleaner above first. Safe Clean converts non-breaking spaces and curly punctuation and removes hidden characters.
- Check the report, then copy the cleaned text.
The Word version of this problem, with the exact menu path for Keep Text Only, is on copying from Word without formatting.
What cleaning cannot do
It cannot recover deleted text, reconstruct a table from an email, or turn a rewritten link back into the original. It works on characters only. If the spacing is still strange after cleaning, the weird spacing guide lists the other causes.