Paste Preview Options in MS Word 2010

Microsoft earlier this month announced intro of Microsoft Office 2010 in Hollywood movie style. MS Office 2010 has many new features and enhancements. We now take a look at one of the handy features in MS Word 2010.

New ‘Paste Options’ in Microsoft Word 2010

In a example below we have a sample text with various formatting. The paragraph has multiple font sizes and multiple font styles.

We copied the paragraph text. Right-Click gives integrated “Paste Options” feature with preview in real-time. This means you can now preview the effects before applying them.

Right click context menu gives 3 Paste Options viz. ‘Keep Source Formatting’, ‘Merge Formatting’, and ‘Keep text only’. These options can also be accessed from Top left corner Paste drop down menu as shown in the image below.

Keep Source Formatting option pastes the copied content as is without any formatting changes as shown in the image below. The second paragraph pasted content is same as the copied content.

Merge Formatting option maintains the uniformity of formatting of the content. The pasted content will have same font style and font size which is present in the majority part of the text. Below image shows the pasted content which has now uniform font style and size.

Keep text only option pastes the copied text as plain unformatted text. It removes all the hyperlinks and style formatting like Font Bold, Underlines etc.

You can also set desired options to default when you perform Copy, Paste or Cut. ‘Set Default Paste…’ in the drop down menu allows you to do that.