Betalogue

When you copy text from a web page in Safari, what gets copied to the Clipboard is formatted text, i.e. text with typical font formatting such as font face, colour, size, style, etc.

If you then go to Word 2004 and try to paste that text into your Word document, it will paste it as formatted text, with all the formatting, which is usually not appropriate when you want to reuse the text in a Word document, where you typically want to use the formatting of your document’s text instead.

There is a way to avoid this, but it’s rather painful. After you’ve copied text in Safari, you go to Word, you go to the “Edit” menu, you select the “Paste Special…” command and then you choose the “Unformatted Text” option and press OK. Not exactly convenient.

Today, I wanted to add a direct command for this to my “Edit” menu. First, I went to Word’s “Customize” dialog to see if, by any chance, Word included such a direct command in its extensive list of commands, of which only a subset is part of the default Word user interface. Even taking into account the very inconsistent and confusing way Microsoft named these commands, I was unable to find such a command.

So I decided to create a short macro instead. I cannot be bothered with learning the whole VisualBasic macro language, so usually when I want to create a new macro I put Word in macro recording mode and do the various actions that I want it to record as a macro, and then I stop the recording and go to the macro editor to fine-tune the macro.

So in this case, I copied some formatted text from Safari, then started recording a macro in Word, went to the “Edit” menu, selected “Paste Special…“, selected the “Unformatted Text” setting, pasted the text, and stopped the macro recording process.

I immediately tried the macro as recorded again, and found that the new macro caused Word to paste formatted text (i.e. the default behaviour for the regular “Paste” command) rather than unformatted text. So I fired up the macro editor and looked at the macro as recorded by Word:

Sub EditPasteUnformatted()
    Selection.PasteAndFormat (wdPasteDefault)
End Sub

I searched for PasteAndFormat in the Visual Basic help and found the following (cropped):

First of all, wdPasteDefault is not listed as a possible value for Type on this help page. Secondly, it’s quite obvious that the value I wanted for this variable is wdFormatPlainText.

Why didn’t Word record my actions properly and use that value rather than wdPasteDefault? I have no idea. You’ll have to ask someone at MIcrosoft. But anyway, after changing the value, the macro finally worked as expected, and I was able to add it to my user interface in Word.

I hope this will be of some use to someone else.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Wednesday, June 9th, 2004 at 4:56 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.