If you use Office and G-Suite, chances are you have used the cut/copy and paste functions. If you’re using a keyboard shortcut to paste, you’re missing out on nuanced options for how to paste the content. The options differ depending on the software application, so let’s take a look at what’s available on the most used platforms.
Jump to Word/Google Docs | Excel/Sheets | PowerPoint/Slides
Options Available in Word/Google Docs
Word
The screenshots in this article are from the desktop version of Word. If you use the online version, your options may vary. After you have cut or copied text, right-click the area where you would like to paste to view your options:
Icon 1 – Keep source formatting: this retains all formatting, pasting identically in the new document. When you hover over the icon, it shows a preview:
Icon 2 – Merge formatting: keeps the text and bold/italics, but uses the font from the destination document and removes color items.
Icon 3 – Use this option to paste the item as a picture. Note that this means you can’t edit the text later.
Icon 4 – This option copies only the text, without any styling. The font matches the destination document.
Google Docs
In Google Docs, there are only two pasting options – paste with formatting (exactly as copied) or paste without formatting (no styling – text in destination document font).
Options Available in Excel/Google Sheets
Excel
Before researching this article, I hadn’t paid attention to how many different paste options were available in Excel. As it turns out, there are multitudes.
If you work with complicated spreadsheets often, all of the paste options probably make sense to you. Being a basic user of Excel, I got lost in the “paste special” options (not shown above). I’ll do my best to decode the main options.
Icon 1 – Paste (basic): keeps all formatting from the original sheet
Icon 2 – Values: paste the numbers only, without formatting. Notice that this also took the date formatting from the first column away.
Icon 3 – Formulas: if there is a formula calculating a value from the original content, that formula will remain, but other formatting will be removed (including date).
Icon 4 – Transpose: I can’t think of a use case for this, but I’m sure there is one. It turns the columns into rows and the rows into columns.
Icon 5 – Formatting: this brings ONLY the formatting and none of the data or formulas.
Icon 6 – Paste link: adds a reference to the source cells rather than copying the cell contents.
I’m not entirely sure why, but it totally changed the last three columns of data by formatting them as dates.
Beyond these options, there is a category called “paste special.” Some of the options mentioned above are repeated in the paste special menmu.
If none of the paste options so far have sounded like what you need, you may want to explore these. Remember, hovering over the icon while you have text on the clipboard will show you a preview of how the paste will look.
Google Sheets
Sheets offers several of the same pasting options, but they appear as text options rather than icons.
Options Available in PowerPoint/Google Slides
PowerPoint
The options available in PowerPoint are nearly identical to Word, with a small difference.
The first icon is “use destination theme” which is similar to the Word option for “merge formatting.” The pasted content takes on the styling of where it is pasted. Icon 2 keeps the source formatting and icon 4 pastes as plain text. To paste as an image, use the third icon.
Slides
As with Google Docs, Slides only provides two options. You can either paste the item with the original formatting, or you can paste as plain text.
Summary
Using ctrl+V to paste is a handy way to paste text exactly as it looked before it was copied/cut. If you right-click where you would like to paste content, you’ll discover several options for pasting that allow you to keep some aspects of the original text while discarding others. In general, Microsoft Office apps offer more options than Google Apps.
