How to Remove Formatting From Text Without Changing the Words

“Remove formatting” covers three different jobs, and the method that fixes one does nothing for the others. Styling such as fonts, colours, bold and links travels beside the text in a rich version of what you copied, and disappears when you paste as plain text. Markup such as HTML tags or Markdown asterisks is made of ordinary characters, so it survives a plain paste and has to be deleted. And plain text can still carry leftovers: doubled spaces, hard line breaks, non-breaking spaces, curly punctuation, invisible characters.

Work out which layer you are looking at and use the method for that layer. Done that way, the words come through exactly as they were.

The three layers

Layer	What it is	How you recognise it	What removes it
1. Styling	Fonts, sizes, colours, bold, italics, links and table grids, stored in the rich-text version of the copy	The pasted text looks like its source instead of matching the document around it	Pasting as plain text, or a Clear formatting command
2. Markup	Characters that describe formatting: HTML tags and entities, Markdown symbols	You can read <p>, &amp;, ** or # in the text itself	Deleting the markup characters
3. Character leftovers	Extra spaces, hard line breaks, non-breaking spaces, smart punctuation, invisible characters	The text looks about right but wraps oddly, fails to match in a search, or is rejected by a form	Whitespace, line-break and character cleanup

Layer 1: styling carried by rich text

When you copy from a word processor, an email or a web page, the clipboard can receive more than one representation of the selection, typically a formatted one and a plain-text one. A rich editor picks the formatted version when you paste. The methods below make it take the plain one, or strip the styling afterwards. Plain text versus rich text describes the mechanism.

Paste without formatting

Where	Shortcut or command
Google Docs	Ctrl+Shift+V, or Cmd+Shift+V on a Mac (Paste without formatting)
Microsoft Word	Ctrl+Shift+V, or Cmd+Shift+V on a Mac (Paste text only); the Keep Text Only paste option does the same
Microsoft Edge	Ctrl+Shift+V, or Cmd+Shift+V on a Mac
Mac apps in general	Option+Shift+Cmd+V (Paste and Match Style)

Many other browsers and editors follow the Ctrl+Shift+V convention, but shortcuts differ between apps and versions. When one does nothing, look in the Edit menu or the right-click menu for an entry named Paste as plain text, Paste without formatting or Paste and Match Style.

Clear formatting on text that is already in place

Word has a Clear All Formatting button on the Home tab, and Ctrl+Spacebar removes manual character formatting from the selection. Google Docs clears text formatting with Ctrl+\ (Cmd+\ on a Mac). Commands like these reset the styling of text that is already in the document. They do not touch the characters, so anything in layers 2 and 3 is still there afterwards.

A plain-text editor as a stopover

Paste into an editor that holds only plain text, then copy from there. A code editor works on any system. On a Mac, TextEdit does the job once you choose Format > Make Plain Text, which discards all text styles and formatting.

The Text Cleaner’s input box

The Input Text box of the Text Cleaner is a plain text field, so pasting into it drops layer 1 before any cleaning happens. If your next step is layer 2 or 3 anyway, no special shortcut is needed.

One caution about pasting as plain text, by any of these routes: it does not change a word, but it does remove whatever was expressed only through styling. That includes the address behind a link, the difference between a heading and a paragraph, the grid of a table, and the raised position of a footnote number, which then sits against its word as an ordinary digit.

Layer 2: markup that is part of the text

Tags and Markdown symbols are characters like any others, which is why pasting as plain text leaves them where they are. They have to be recognised and deleted.

In the Text Cleaner the Plain Text preset handles both kinds at once. It strips HTML tags, decodes HTML entities such as &, and removes Markdown heading markers, bold and italic markers, and code fences and backticks. Stripping tags means more than deleting them: <br> and block-level tags become line breaks, and the contents of <script> and <style> are dropped. If the text holds Markdown but no HTML, the AI Formatting preset applies only the Markdown options. Each option can also be ticked separately: tags, entities, headings and bold/italic in the Markup card under the Input Text box, code fences and list markers in the Markup group under Advanced Cleaning Options.

Both subjects have their own guides: converting HTML to plain text and removing Markdown formatting.

Layer 3: leftovers inside plain text

Text can be free of styling and markup and still be untidy. The default General Clean preset handles the common cases: it converts non-breaking spaces to ordinary spaces, trims trailing spaces from each line, collapses repeated spaces inside lines while leaving leading indentation alone, reduces runs of blank lines to one, and trims the start and end of the text. It never changes words, punctuation, letter case, emoji, URLs, email addresses, Markdown or HTML.

The rest is opt-in and grouped by kind: Line Breaks for text that was hard-wrapped by a PDF or an email, Typography for curly quotes, dashes and the ellipsis character, and Characters for zero-width spaces, byte order marks, soft hyphens and control characters. Invisible Unicode characters explains which of those are safe to remove.

Which steps can change the content

Not every cleanup step is purely cosmetic. Some only rearrange whitespace. Others delete or substitute characters that might have carried meaning, and those stay off until you choose them.

Operation	Risk to content	In the Text Cleaner
Trimming, collapsing repeated spaces, reducing blank lines, converting non-breaking spaces	None to the words; only whitespace changes	On in every preset
Joining wrapped lines	Words are unchanged, but lines meant to stay separate, such as an address or verse, are merged	Off by default; part of PDF Copy
Stripping HTML tags	Text in angle brackets that is not a tag, such as a placeholder like <name>, is removed along with the real tags	Off by default; part of Plain Text
Removing Markdown bold/italic markers	Symbols doing another job can be caught: __init__ outside backticks becomes init. Arithmetic such as 2**8 and 5*3*2 is left alone	Off by default; part of Plain Text and AI Formatting
Removing Markdown list markers	Step numbers disappear, and the order they recorded with them	Off in every preset
Rejoining words hyphenated across lines	A heuristic: well- at the end of one line and known on the next become wellknown	Off in every preset
Converting smart quotes, dashes and the ellipsis	Punctuation characters are replaced with ASCII ones	Off in every preset
Changing letter case	Names and acronyms lose their capitals, and the change cannot be reversed	Off; the default is Keep case
Removing duplicate lines	Whole lines are deleted	Off in every preset

A workable habit: start with the preset that matches where the text came from, read the summary of what changed, and add the riskier options one at a time. The original stays in the Input Text box after each run, so the two versions are always side by side.

Before and after

This snippet comes from a help page written in Markdown with a little inline HTML. It was pasted as plain text, so layer 1 is already gone. Here · stands for a space and [NBSP] for a non-breaking space (U+00A0).

Before

**Opening hours**··

Mon–Fri:[NBSP]9:00–17:30
Sat:···10:00–14:00


<em>Closed</em> on public holidays &amp; the first Monday of each month.

After

Opening hours

Mon–Fri: 9:00–17:30
Sat: 10:00–14:00

Closed on public holidays & the first Monday of each month.

That is the Plain Text preset. The bold markers and the <em> tags are gone, & is an ampersand, the non-breaking space is an ordinary space, and the spacing is even. Every word and number is identical, and the en dashes in the times are untouched because the Typography options were left off.