There seems to be two types of pasting for windows apps, Paste and Paste Special.

If I copy text from an email into an Excel doc using Paste, the font
and text size of the source document (email) is maintained. It can be
changed later of course, but it comes in as that of the source doc.

If I copy text from email to Excel using Paste Special, I can specify
'Text', allowing the font and size to arrive matching the font and
size of the rest of the Excel doc, and thus eliminate the need to
modify it later.

It seems there should be a way of locking in the 'Text' option for
paste mode so that I can avoid the extra clicks involved with using
Paste Special.

These extra clicks wouldn't be a big deal except that I'm copying
hundreds of mailing addresses from email to Excel, and would much
prefer using the very quick CTRL+C and CTRL+V combination.

Patrice_29

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Request for Question Clarification by aht-ga on 11 Apr 2004 20:02 PDT

patrice-29:

That's one of my pet peeves as well. Unfortunately, the default
behavior for Ctrl-V is the standard Paste function, which as you know
all too well, pastes both the text and its attributes.

The solution I use, is to define my own keyboard shortcut, linked to a
macro that calls the Paste Special As Text function. Then, I simply
use Ctrl-Shift-V when I want to paste as text only, leaving Ctrl-V for
when I want text and attributes.

If this is something that you are interested in, just let me know and
I can provide an Answer with full instructions on setting this up in
your own Excel.

Regards,

aht-ga
Google Answers Researcher

I suppose you've got Office XP

For any questions for any MSOffice product (and OSs) probably the best
resource on the net (or anywhere for that matter)is the lounge at
wopr.com.  The people who will answer your questions are the ones who
write the books.  I could go there and get the answer for you but if
you go you might want more details, etc.  It is an awesome place.  So
point your browser to
http://www.wopr.com  
and enter the lounge, 
http://tinyurl.com/yu7q9  
register (it's free as is the whole site) go one the excel board and
ask away.  It usually takes no more than a few hours for a response. 
And you don't even have to check back to see when it is answered
because the response comes right into your private e-mail box as well
as being posted on the net.  It might take a bit longer today as it is
a holiday.

There used to be an option like that in Word 97 which you can alter to
automatically paste as text but Microsoft removed it when they
released MS Word 2000.

Since I'm using Word 2000 at work, I cant check the other version, but
check if you could find it under "Tools + Options + Edit".

As a workaround, I believe you can accomplish pasting a text as a macro.

Very simple really to do all you need to do is create a new macro to
get the job done, though you will need to change the keys you are
using (ctrl+d, or some other key combo that is not being used). To
start open excel and create a new document. Click on the "tool" menu
and go down to "macro". On the menu that pops out to the side click on
"Record New Macro". Give the macro a name, something that will be easy
to remember should you need it in the future (ie. "email paste"). Pick
out a key combo that you would like to use and enter it into the
shortcut key box. To make your new macro available to all excel
documents select "Personal Macro Workbook" in the store macro in
dropdown box. Edit the description if you feel the spirit move you to
do so. Next click on "ok" the macro will start recording everything
that you do from this point on. Now, click on the edit menu and select
"paste special" in the dialog box that appears select text and click
OK. Now click on the "Stop recording" button in the macro control box.
Congrats you're all done, now whenever you press you key combo in any
excel document you will not paste in the text formatting. If you need
an other help please leave me a post.

BTW... These steps are for Excel XP but other versions are very similar.

The comment from 'newstudios' should help you.  Also, you can select,
edit, paste special, and values.  This preserves the format of the
target document.

Since your task is really pasting the hundreds of addresses from email
into excel, you could try AddressGrabber Deluxe, which is great for
extracting this type of information and putting it into any number of
formats (excel, outlook contacts, etc.).  There's a free trial
available that will let you try it out for 15 days and do 100
addresses.  Take a look at
http://www.egrabber.com/addressgrabberdeluxe/index.html