Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated September 20, 2025)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365
Allan quite often copies and pastes into Word from other documents and from web pages. When he pastes such content, he has to select what he pasted and then format it as UK English. (Word seems to default on his system to US English.) Allan wonders if there is a way to paste and have Word automatically format what he's pasting as UK English so that he doesn't have to go through the extra step.
In Word, the language associated with text is considered a format of that text, just like bold, italic, or font size. This means that if you have text you want to use a particular language when you paste it, the easiest way is to follow these two general steps:
The drawback to this approach, of course, is that any other formatting in the text being copied is lost when the pasting is complete. This means you'll need to go back and reapply any formatting you want in the pasted text. Because of that drawback, you may decide it is easier to change the language after pasting than it is to change the other formatting—the decision is going to depend entirely on the nature of what you are pasting and the results you hope to achieve.
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2025-09-24 18:54:34
Tomek
You could create a macro that will paste the text and then reformat it to a language of your choice. The problem is that the pasted text is not automatically selected, so the macro would have to do that as well. I have ideas how to do that using either bookmarks or position counter, and if I succeed I will post it here later.
Once you have a macro, you can assign it to a keyboard shortcut (even replacing the default Ctrl+V) or create a button on the QAT.
All that will work with the original text being in English (US, Canada, Australia...), but what if the original text is in another language, particularly one that does not use Latin alphabet (e.g., Greek, Ukrainian, Arabic or Chinese)?
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