If you do a lot of cutting and pasting from one document to another in Word (2004 and 2008) and want your pasting to adopt the style of the new document, you will know what a pain in the butt it is.

Word expects you to go to the Edit menu, choose Paste Special and then select Unformatted Text in the next dialog box and click OK.

I couldn’t count the number of hours I’ve spent doing this. I came to accept it as an Office for Mac user’s fate; something that just had to be endured.

Joe Kissell, senior editor at TidBITS, has the shortcut I wish I had discovered years ago. In a TidBITS post he provides the scripts needed to reduce this convoluted process to a single keystroke.

As he points out, I could have automated this with the macro-recorder in Word 2004. Never thought of that!

But Word 2008 has lost its scripting support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and ,along with that, the ability to record macros.

Instead, in Word 2008 you will need to use AppleScript.

Joe provides the steps for setting up the macro in Word 2004 and the applescript Word 2008 users will need to get the same result.

He even unlocks the mysteries of the way a file called Paste Plain Text\smV.scpt is automatically bound to a keystroke shortcut.

Check out his article and other newsy posts and tips at TidBITS. word 2004, word 2008, office for mac, pasting, scripts, VBA, tips, productivity, tidbitsSimilar Posts:

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