Pasting Text into Your Email? Stop It from Messing Up Your Formatting
We’ve all been there: You’re writing an email and you paste in a paragraph from some other website. Now, when you’re trying to type commentary on the paragraph you just pasted, your text has adopted the same formatting — same font, same size, same everything. It’s not necessarily a tragic event, but it’s really annoying.
So what do you do now? Leave it to look horrifyingly inconsistent? Manually reformat? Here are the quickest ways to fix this problem in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook:
Gmail
If you’re using Chrome, you can paste text into your emails without carrying over its formatting by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+V (Command-Shift-V for OS X).
If you’d like to keep the formatting of the text you’re pasting, the Gmail Strike button is for you. Transfer the text, write out the rest of your email, and then click on the text formatting button at the bottom of the email draft.
From there, a bar with formatting options will pop up.
Go ahead and select the text you want to remove formatting from, and then click the T× symbol.
Voilà, the text you selected is back to Gmail’s default formatting.
You can also always switch the whole email to plain text by clicking on the downward-pointing arrow on the bottom right of the email. But that means you can’t do anything fancy (not to mention, graphics are out of the question).
Yahoo Mail
If you’re using Yahoo Mail, you can also paste text from outside sources as plain text on a case-by-case basis with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+V (Command-Shift-V for OS X).
Or you can switch to plain text mode. But know that this isn’t a selective option, meaning that it’ll change the entire text of your email.
Outlook
The best option in Outlook is switching to plain text. When composing an email, click the Options tab on the upper-left side of the message.
From there, click the switch above the word Format. Now you’re in plain text.
And that’s it! Hopefully this will save you some time answering emails. Lord knows you need it.
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