Friday, May 20, 2011

Tips and tricks

David Pogue has a good bunch of basic tips and tricks. Hardly anybody at all know them all.
This one for instance will help me daily:
In Microsoft Word, when you paste in text from another document—say, a Web site — you may not want all the boldface, colors, fonts and other formatting from the original source. Instead of using the regular Paste command, in that case, open the Edit menu and click Paste Special. Click Unformatted Text. You’ll get just the text, without the fanciness.

This also works works when I paste text from a web site into a blog post. I select Edit/Paste and match style. Previously I had to change back and forth between "compose" mode and HTML mode in the blog posts. Otherwise I'd get a big mess of formatting in the middle of the post. (Not sure why that is default.)

2 comments:

Alex said...

I like Pogue, he keeps saying nice things about us, like his recent review of the Casio Tryx DSC. All through that he extols the virtues of the Cisco Flip Video camera.

Also thanks to Pogue blowing the whistle in this obituary I can publicly talk about the WiFi Flip camera I worked on for the last 6 months.

John D. Linn said...

Your example is still too much work... download this free and simple utility that I use constantly:

http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/

I have ctrl-p set-up as my hot key but you can assign anything you like. Then ctrl-c to copy... ctrl-p to paste with text only, no formatting or other junk. Works like a champ. Oh, but this is only for Windows PC.

On Mac there is a key combination built-in which is SHIFT-ALT-CMD + V... need lots of fingers for that!