You have to love the Microsoft Office developers who decided that when you copy and paste information into an Office 2003 document, you don’t just copy the text that you wanted into your document, you paste the formatting too. Typeface, size, underline, bold, whatever the text looked like from the source of the copy and paste, it now looks the same in your Office document.
Maybe everyone else in the world wanted Word to behave in this way, but I for one do not. I do not want a copy and paste command to mess around with the way that I want my document to look. If I am frequently Alt-Tabbing between a reference and a Word document copying text from one to the other using Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V, I am now faced with the stupid Autocorrect floating toolbar thingy which I now have to move my busy hands from my keyboard to my mouse to click on to select “Leave my formatting alone, dammit, and just paste the text”.
Of course this annoyance wouldn’t be so bad if the developers had simply provided a way to TURN IT OFF. Search in the Word options you will discover the option “Smart Cut and Paste”. Unchecking the option does absolutely NOTHING. Searching around on Google, I came across this “solution” from the Microsoft Office Assistance website. Create a fucking MACRO?!? So the solution from Microsoft is “We were too lazy to program in an option for you, so why don’t you do it for us.” Thanks a lot.
Oh, and the other way that you can paste unformatted text is by using the Edit menu and selecting Paste Special. You then have to navigate a pop-up form asking you how you want to paste your text. What is the nice keyboard shortcut for this command? NOTHING! Once again, you must sacrifice productivity by moving your hands to a mouse to navigate a menu and a dialog form just to paste your text.
I am glad that I usually never have to use Word anymore, and if I did, I’d probably go crazy like that airplane and start killing people.
