As lawyers and law students, we’re forever pasting text into Word from PDFs and our internet browsers.  Isn’t it annoying when you’ve got all your headings the way you want them, the text is formatted for your filing, and you paste a rule from LII only to have it mess up all your formatting?

I’ll answer for you.  Yes.  Yes, it is annoying.

So here’s how to fix that:

Step 1: Open Word.  Click on the (1) Windows button on the top left-hand corner, and click on (2) Word Options.

Step 2: Click on the (3) Advanced tab.  Scroll down to the “Cut, copy, and paste” section, and change “Pasting from other programs” to (4) “Keep Text Only.”

Simple as that.  Now whenever you paste into a document from the web or a PDF (or anything else, for that matter) it should just paste in the text without the rich text formatting.

No more continuously fixing your formatting!