Word 2008 and the Paste Plain Text Dance

Why can you just assign the menu item a shortcut using System Preferences? Does this not work with Word? ~Stephen

[That would almost certainly work too, though in the case of the scripts menu, I like consistency with other scripts - plus it's handy to be able to distribute it with the keyboard shortcut built right in. -Joe]

Owners of You Control already have a plain-text paste feature. It's part of
the multi-clipboard module. When choosing a past clipboard item to paste, a
sub-menu allows for pasting with formatting stripped.

[True enough, and to reiterate what I mentioned in the article, there are oodles of third-party clipboard and macro utilities that can do this sort of thing. But it's something Word ought to have included by default, and I wanted to offer a solution that didn't require buying or installing any additional software. -Joe]

--Lee Bennett

Thank God you complained: I thought I was the only person in the
entire world who hated this "feature" of Word. 99% of the time, I want
to paste in unformatted text. Why can't that be the default?

This is especially bad in Microsoft Outlook when I cut something out
of IE or a Word document and paste it into Outlook. And, in Outlook,
the format is almost impossible to correct. Once you paste in that
weblink, and your text is now bold, twice the size it use to be, and
red in color, everything you type after that will also be bold, twice
the size it use to be, and red.

I have the VI editor (Yes, that one) up and running at all times. If I
need to paste in plain text, I paste it into this editor, cut it out
of this editor, then paste it into Word or Outlook.

--
David Weintraub
qazwartgmail.com

This isn't a VBA/AppleScript issue, but in the category of 'functions you need very often but that are hidden away on dialog boxes in Word' I would add "Paragraph Keep With Next." One of the biggest frustrations is with trying to avoid having a new heading orphaned at the bottom of a page when the text it relates to is at the top of the next. I use this many times a day. However, one has to go to Format-Paragraph and then on to the Line and Page Breaks tab to find it. And there isn't even an icon associated with it, so if you want to put it on a toolbar, you either have to design your own or put up with a really long text-based icon. The law firm I used to work for found it such an often-requested feature, that they designed a custom icon so they could use it as a standard install.

[Thanks, I've added that to my list. That's actually one I use pretty often myself, too. -Joe]

At 06:26 01/23/08 -0800, adville wrote:
>One of the biggest frustrations is with trying to avoid having a new
>heading orphaned at the bottom of a page when the text it relates to is at
>the top of the next. I use this many times a day.

If you are using it many times a day, then you don't have your heading
styles set up. Create a standard template with "keep with next" set on all
heading styles, and then use only those styles to format documents. (In a
law office, I would think that the value of standardizing formatting alone
would warrant using only approved styles to format all documents anyway.)

So I disagree with putting this in the same category as "paste plain". With
"paste plain", you need it every time you encounter the situation. With
"keep with next", if you have done the proper setup in advance, you almost
never need to access it explicitly. In this case Microsoft has actually
provided a powerful tool so that you don't need to find this option often.

There are things I don't like about MS Word styles, but what I dislike most
about them is NOT seeing them used. I despise having to edit a 50-page
document with hard-coded formatting on every paragraph just because the
author couldn't be bothered learning to use styles.

Edward
--
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org

At 2008-01-23 19:07 -0800 Edward Reid wrote:

>There are things I don't like about MS Word styles, but what I dislike most
>about them is NOT seeing them used. I despise having to edit a 50-page
>document with hard-coded formatting on every paragraph just because the
>author couldn't be bothered learning to use styles

Edward - hear, hear! I have loved the concept of styles ever since I
first used MacAuthor - which virtually compelled you to define styles
_before_ you could write anything.

I much prefer the way MacWrite Pro (and now Pages) have implemented
styles to what Word does, but to people wasting their time by _not_
using styles gets me as angry as having to deal with 50-page
free-format lists that should have been made using a database manager
(or at least a spreadsheet) instead of a word-processor. (Oh, that's
better!)

regards

Rowland
--
| Rowland Carson ... that's Rowland with a 'w' ...
| <rowlandcarsongooglemail.com> http://home.clara.net/rowil/

At 6:17 AM -0800 1/21/08, David Weintraub wrote:
>I have the VI editor (Yes, that one) up and running at all times. If I
>need to paste in plain text, I paste it into this editor, cut it out
>of this editor, then paste it into Word or Outlook.

        I often paste-then-cut into one of the address or subject fields of
the email program to get rid of formatting - I don't know if Entourage will
do that for the subject line, but it might. Also, in Eudora, the
"wrap/unwrap selection" gets rid of formatting - I often select swaths of
material and invoke those commands (which I have placed into the
button-bar) to clean things up.


--
* Johann Beda - contact link: <http://xri.net/=j-beda> *
* Johann's MostlyMac Computer Consulting - <http://mmcc.beda.ca/> *