Be Gone, Evil Formatting - I Cast Thee Out!!

You know the feeling - you copy something from your web browser and go to paste it into whatever application you're working in. The text comes through, but with it comes loads of annoying formatting that you really do not want. If you're using Office 2007, it's easy enough to use the little smart-tag to say "keep text only" but if you're using just about anything else (and if you're like me) then your blood pressure rises just a little more as you launch notepad, paste the text, copy it back out of notepad (now delightfully format-free) and paste it into your target application once more.

I've done this at least a thousand times so far this year. And I'm sure I'm not alone. In fact, I did it once in my last blog entry, and that one time broke the proverbial camel's back.

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

PureText is an application allows you to paste the text that's on the Windows clipboard - just the text, and nothing else - into any application, format free and blood pressure neutral. It defines a global keyboard shortcut (Win-V) by default so you never need to take your hands off the keyboard. What could be better?

This isn't a new tool, but it is new to me. I'm sure that once I can get my fingers trained to hit Win-V instead of ctrl-V, I'll swear a lot less. Check it out.