Maintain format during copy and paste

- [Narrator] Sometimes when you copy and paste text from one document to another, it can introduce some frustrating problems. Let's work with these two documents I have open here. I want to copy this text from this document and paste it into the other document. So I've got it selected, I could use the keyboard shortcut to copy it, or I could click the copy button here in the home ribbon. Then I'll go to the other document, place the cursor where I want it to be, and for now I'm just going to use the paste button here in the home ribbon. And so of course, that worked fairly well, but we do have an issue.

The text that we pasted has a completely different font size and other formatting options from what was originally in the document. We have a mismatch in the formatting here, and that kind of makes the document look bad. We could manually fix it, or we could learn how to be smarter about copying and pasting text. First, I'm going to undo the paste action we just did and just so we can focus on it, lets maximize this window and just look at this one document. So once again, I'm going to place my cursor where I want the text to go.

I'm going to go to the paste button in the home ribbon, but I'm not just going to click on the button, I'm goin to click on the bottom of the button which opens up this menu. There are a few shortcut buttons right here, but for now, let's go to paste special and that opens up this little window and we can see a few different options we have for pasting this text. I want to start with the option for un-formatted text. That will only paste the text that you have copied and it will strip out any and all formatting. So I'll choose that, click okay, and now that text is pasted in here.

Now in this case, the un-formatted text that we pasted in takes on the formatting of all of the text around it. So that's one really good way to go, but I want to look at some other options. So once again, I will hit undo. We still have our cursor where we want it to be, and I'll go back to that paste menu. This time, I want to look at the shortcut buttons that we have right here, but before I even click on anything, I want to see that we can simply point at these shortcuts and it gives me a preview in the document of how this text will look when it's pasted, using any one of these options.

Now this preview feature only works on Windows, not on a mac, but you can get an idea of how this works here. If I were to choose this first option, which is keep source formatting, it would paste this text with the formatting it had in the original document. If I choose merge formatting, it would use the formatting from the document that I'm pasting into. If I choose the option for keep text only, it's basically the same as that paste as un-formatted text option that we saw a moment ago.

I also have an option here to paste it in as a picture, which is a little strange. It will just take what ever I had copied, convert it into a picture and paste that into the document. Now if we were to choose merge formatting or keep text only, those are going to be very similar, with some very subtle differences. In both cases we end up with the font and size of the text in the destination document, but in this case because we're pasting something that's formatted as a bulleted list in the original document if we choose merge formatting, it will still be formatted as that bulleted list, with the tabs associated with the bulleted list on this document, but the size and the font will match the text on this page.

However, if I were to choose keep text only, it'd strip out all the formatting, including the formatting for the bulleted list. Now granted, we will still see the actual bullets, but those will now be converted to characters of text in the margins associated with the bulleted list are going to be stripped out. So I think, in this case, the best option is merge formatting and we can see that works pretty well here in this document. But clearly, you're going to need to choose whichever option works best for you in each scenario.