The most annoying thing that I have come across when using Microsoft Office is when you copy some text from a web site and paste it inside a Word document, then it also copies all the formatting and style (like color, size, font etc.) of the original text. It takes so much time trying to remove all the formatting and strip it only to just the plain text. But there is a freeware called PureText which can alleviate you from this painful task. The free tool PureText strips down all the formatting from the copied text and leaves only the plain text which you can paste in any document you want.
You can download PureText from http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/. The download is in form of a ZIP archive. You can extract the program executable from it using a freeware un-zip tool like 7-Zip. The program itself is a portable program and does not need to be installed in Windows. Just double-click on the executable PureText.exe to run it.
When PureText is running, you can copy any selected text by using Ctrl + C or by right-clicking on any selected text and choosing Copy – like you do normally. But if you want to paste only the plain text without the formatting, then just press the hotkey Windows logo key + V. Do not worry, if you want to paste the original text (with all the formatting), then use Ctrl + V hotkey like you usually do.
If you want the stripped down plain text to be available to the usual Paste funtion, then right-click on the PureText icon in the notification area (system tray) and choose Convert to Text. After this you can paste the plain text (without formatting) using the usual hotkey Ctrl + V too (you can also right-click anywhere in a document and select Paste).
The default hotkey for pasting text using PureText is Windows logo key + V, but you can change it in the PureText options to any desired hotkey. To open the PureText options, right-click on the PureText icon in the notification area and choose Options. You can choose any customized hotkey as you wish.
If you find PureText very useful and see yourself using PureText very often, then you can set PureText to start automatically with Windows. In the Options check the checkbox labeled Automatically run PureText each time I log on to Windows. After you save the settings by clicking on the OK button, PureText would be set to auto-start with Windows.
The free tool PureText is great for copying paste any text from different web sites without the unwanted formatting. This is specially useful if you do a lot of copying pasting from web pages into office applications like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer etc.