Typically when you copy some text from a webpage or any other application and paste it in a Word document, the formatting is retained. This might be ok in some cases. But more often than not, it would be preferable to lose the formatting as you would not want the pasted text to disrupt the style of your existing document.

You could easily achieve this by using the Paste Special option which lets you paste text without any formatting. But if you have to do this often, then there is an easier way to do this in Word 2007 and Word 2010. You could change the default settings to paste text only.

To do this, click on the Office icon and select Word Options. Choose the Advanced tab on the left. You will find the options under the ‘Cut, copy and paste’ section. Word offers different settings for different scenarios. This is very convenient, as you could change the default paste setting to text, only when you paste text from other programs. Once you change the option ‘Pasting from other programs’ to ‘Keep Text Only’, you can then paste directly using ‘Ctrl+V’ or clicking on the Paste button to paste unformatted text.