Pasted Text is Surrounded by Boxes

Many times, when Judi pastes content copied from the internet, it pastes with boxes around everything—every individual line. Judi tried to uncheck "Show text boundaries," but that didn't work. She finds it very annoying. She wants to be able to Ctrl+V to paste rather than take the extra steps to select the Keep Text Only paste option.

When you paste into Word, it tries to paste information so that it looks like what you copied. When dealing with information coming from the internet, that means that Word pastes information as HTML, using formatting consistent with what the original looked like.

The solution to this, as alluded to by Judi, is to paste text only. The traditional way of doing this is to use the "extra steps" necessary, like clicking the down-arrow next to the Paste tool (on the Home tab of the ribbon) and choosing either Paste Text Only or choose Paste Special and then choosing Unformatted Text.

In the version of Word provided with Microsoft 365, a change was made so that you can use a keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Shift+V, to paste text only. Judi knows about using Ctrl+V to paste, if she is using Word 365, then Ctrl+Shift+V is a great addition to her editing toolbox.

If you always, no matter what, want to paste text only, then you can follow these steps to make the proper configuration change in Word:

1. Display the Word Options dialog box. (In Word 2007 click the Office button and then click Word Options. In Word 2010 and later versions, display the File tab of the ribbon and then click Options.)
2. Click Advanced at the left side of the dialog box and scroll down to the Cut, Copy, and Paste section. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The advanced options of the Word Options dialog box.

Notice, at the top of this section of the options, there are four settings that control the default way in which pasted text should be handled. You can set these any way desired. For Judi's needs, the Pasting from Other Programs drop-down should be changed to Keep Text Only. This should cause Ctrl+V to paste information from the internet as text only, which will stop the boxes Judi is seeing from appearing.

When you are done making any configuration changes, click the OK button to close the Word Options dialog box. Your changes should take effect immediately.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (11491) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365.