Gone are the days when students used to look for those big and bulky books in the library and then sit down patiently to make notes using with a pen and paper. Now they just go online and copy-paste text from different websites into Microsoft Word and in a few minutes they have everything they need. But when you copy text from different webpages, the clipboard gets not only the text but also all the formatting along with it including the font, font size, text color and more. One traditional way to remove the formatting is to first paste the text in Windows Notepad and then copy is from Notepad and into whatever Word processor you are using.
But there are simpler methods available. For example, you can use the PlainTextClipboard in Windows to instantly remove all the formatting from the clipboard. Unlike some other programs, the PlainTextClipboard program does not have any bulky, complicated or confusing interface. In fact, this program does not have any interface it all. Whenever you need to remove the formatting from the clipboard text, you can launch this program. It runs for a fraction of a second, removes the formatting in the clipboard and then closes down. Now you can paste the clipboard content into any word editor without worrying about the formatting.
There are more than one way to launch the PlainTextClipboard program. First method is to just double-click on its Desktop shortcut. But the easiest way to use it is through the hotkey Ctrl+Alt+T that is set during the program installation. If you want to use a different hotkey, then you can right-click on the desktop shortcut, open Properties, and then configure a new hotkey from there.
Conclusion: PlainTextClipboard has no user interface, but perhaps this is why it removes the formatting from the clipboard text so fast. If you copy-paste a lot everyday and have to remove the formatting often, then this tool could be indispensable for you.
You can download PlainTextClipboard from http://www.extrabit.com/plaintextclipboard/.