Feature Review: Clipboard Paste Formatting Options

One of the new features in the upcoming Office 2010 lets you, when pasting text from the clipboard, select what formatting to include and what to exclude, as demonstrated in this video. This capability helps makes it easier to copy text from another formatted source while retaining the format of the target document.

We, of course, saw that value in this some time ago. Much of the time, when you are pasting text into a slide, it is coming from a formatted source like a Microsoft Word document. When doing this, you typically don't want format elements like font and size to follow the text. However, some formatting elements, such as bold and underline, you may want to include.

The slide show builder has long had the capability to let you insert plain text from a formatted source. In the April 2008 Edition of SongShow Plus, this flexibility was extended to let you be more specific about what is included and what isn't. Here's a screen shot of those options:

As you can see, you have the option to include or exclude font, style, size, and color. You can also choose to always paste as plain text. In this example, I've chosen to ignore font, size, and color, but to include style. That way something like this:

Pay attention to this very important point.

gets pasted as

Pay attention to this very important point.

These options are set from the Tools > Preferences menu. They don't show up on a per-paste basis since it's likely that you will typically use the same options repeatedly. You do, however, always have the option of pasting by using Ctrl-N which is the plain-text paste.

(BE208)

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