Copy Text From Word Without the Formatting

Word puts several formats on the clipboard at once, including rich HTML that carries fonts, styles and internal class names, plus plain text. The plain text still contains typographic characters Word created: curly quotes, en and em dashes, the single ellipsis character, and non-breaking spaces or hyphens if someone inserted them.

No. Keep Text Only removes fonts, colours, styles and links, but the characters themselves are text, so curly quotes and em dashes stay. To turn them into straight quotes and plain hyphens, run the text through a cleaner with typography normalisation, or convert them with find and replace.

Copy in Word, then in the destination use its paste-as-plain-text shortcut, usually Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows and Cmd+Shift+V on Mac. In Word itself, use the Paste Options button that appears after pasting and choose Keep Text Only, or set the default under File, Options, Advanced, Cut, copy, and paste.

They are probably non-breaking spaces (U+00A0), which Word inserts when someone presses Ctrl+Shift+Space and which some templates use between numbers and units. They look like spaces but are a different character, so ordinary trimming and find-and-replace for a normal space miss them. A cleaner converts them to regular spaces.

Copying from Word normally carries the final visible text, so tracked-change markup and comments generally do not appear in plain text. If you can see deleted text after pasting, accept or reject changes in Word first. A character cleaner only works on characters and cannot decide which edits you want to keep.