Windows Word: create a new shortcut to paste text only without style

Ctrl-c and Ctrl-v are shortcut keys to copy and paste text in Windows. When copy a piece of text from an application, the style of the text is copied as well. Most of the time, we want the pasted text to have the same style of the context in the Word document, and ignore the original style from the other application. After we paste the text with Ctrl-v shortcut, we need to click on the little popup icon and choose the Keep Text Only option. Another way is to click the down-arrow in the Paste icon of the Toolbar and select the Keep Text Only icon or Paste Special... option.

Here we have a faster way to paste the text without any style in Word. Let us set up a new shortcut key to paste with the Keep Text Only option:

1. In Word, click on the File menu and select Options.
2. Click on Customize Ribbon option on the left side of the Word Options dialogue.
3. Find the Keyboard shortcuts item at the middle-bottom of the dialogue and click on the Cutomize... button beside it.
4. In the Customize Keyboard dialogue, select All Commands in the Categories box.
5. Select PasteTextOnly in the Commands box.
6. Click in the Press new shortcut key box. Then press the shortcut you like. e.g. Alt-v to generate the new shortcut key.
7. Click on the Assign button and the shortcut combination is added into the Current keys box.
8. Click on the Close button.

After the setup, we can use the new shortcut to paste the text without style into the Word document.