PureText

My favourite tool is PureText. If you work with text, you’ll love it too.

PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a Paste, followed by a Select-All, and then a Copy.
PureText website

PureText lets you paste unformatted text using your own keyboard shortcut. (I use Ctrl-Space).

How it saves time

Imagine that you’ve just messed up the fonts in a Word document by pasting text from the web. This is a pain, because you have to spend time highlighting the text and correcting the fonts.

Use PureText and you’ll never waste this time again, as pasted text uses the same formatting as existing text.

What if you’re copying text from Word to a content management system?  With normal paste you get phantom formatting in your HTML. With PureText, what you paste is what you get.

And my favourite. If you copy an Excel cell, PureText pastes the visible value and not the hidden formula.

Why you’re mad not to try it

Other applications have paste-as-text functions but PureText uses the same hotkey in every application.  It’s free, weighs in at 13kb and doesn’t even need to be installed to work. (It is PC only though).

Download and run PureText. Map it to Ctrl-Space and set it to run every time you boot up. The time savings are small but they add up.