- Sometimes when you copy and paste text
from one document to another,
it can introduce some frustrating problems.
I'm starting with this document and this document,
and I want to copy text from this document
and paste it into the other.
So naturally I'm going to select that text.
Then I can go to the Home ribbon and click the Copy button,
then switch over to the other document.
I'm just going to make a new paragraph
in the middle of this section.
Then I'll go to the Home ribbon
and click the Paste button to paste that text in.
And that worked fairly well, but we do have an issue.
The text that we pasted has a completely different font,
size and other formatting settings
from the text that was already on this page.
So we have a mismatch in style that just looks bad.
Now we could manually fix it
or we could learn how to be smarter
about copying and pasting.
So first I'm going to undo that paste action.
So I'll go to the Home ribbon and click the Undo button,
and it just takes us one step back.
And I'm going to paste it again, but this time,
instead of simply clicking the Paste button
in the Home ribbon,
I'm going to click the arrow underneath the Paste button,
which opens up this menu.
And we're going to start by looking at Paste Special.
This gives you some options for how you can paste
what you have on the clipboard.
And one of these options is unformatted text.
That will only paste the text that you have copied
and will strip out any and all formatting.
So let's do that.
I have that selected, I'll click OK,
and it pasted in that text.
And in this case the unformatted text that we pasted
just takes on the formatting of the text around it.
So that's one really good way to go,
but let's look at a few other options.
So once again, I'll go to the Home ribbon
and click the Undo button to take a step back.
And once again, we'll go to the Paste button
and click the arrow under the Paste button,
and I want to focus on these four shortcuts
up at the top of this menu.
But first, I'm not going to click on any of them.
Instead, I'm going to simply point
at one of them without clicking.
And when I do that,
it gives me a preview in the document
of how this text would look when it's pasted.
This preview only works on Windows, not on a Mac,
but in this case, I can see what it would look like
before I actually click the button.
So if I were to choose this first option
that keeps source formatting,
it would this text with the formatting it had
in the original document.
If I were to choose Merge Formatting,
it would use the formatting
from the document that I'm pasting into.
The Picture option is a little strange.
That will convert whatever I had copied into a picture
and paste that into the document.
And then the Keep Text Only option is the same
as that paste as unformatted text option
that we saw a moment ago.
So you'll see that Merge Formatting
and Keep Text Only are very similar
with just some subtle differences.
In both cases, we will end up with the font
and size of the text in that destination document.
But because we just happen to be pasting something
that's formatted as a bulleted list
in the original document,
if we were to choose Merge Formatting,
it would still be formatted as a bulleted list
with the tabs associated with the list in this document,
but the font and the size will match the text on the page.
Now, if I were to choose Keep Text Only,
it strips out all formatting,
including the formatting for the bulleted list.
Now granted, we do still see the actual bullets
but those would be converted to characters of text,
and the margins associated with that list
would be stripped out.
So in this case,
I think the best option is Merge Formatting.
I can click that, it paste it in, and it looks pretty good.
But clearly you need to choose whichever option works best
for each scenario.
(bright music)