Copying and pasting text between applications without style When pasting text, some applications (Chrome, Microsoft Office, etc.) will do what they can to re-render copied text with style, and some of those applications do not appear to offer an option to paste without style.

This results in spending lots of time removing formatting (where it is even possible) and then cleaning up the mess left behind, just to get clean text.

I want to prevent text styling from attaching itself to text that I copy and paste between applications. Is there an OS-level way to do this, i.e. one that can apply to all applications? Failing that, is there a per-application way to tell Chrome, Safari, Word etc. not to copy and/or paste with style?
O/S X does have a "universal" key combination to paste without any style, it's SHIFT-COMMAND-OPTION-V

Unfortunately Microsoft uses their own text engine rather than the Mac's built-in one so that does not work there. The only options I have found for word is to create a Macro to paste plain text. You could download one of this but the one's I found were for the PC version and I never got them to work in the Mac version.

But I just find it easier to paste it into a plain text editor (I use Bbedit or TextWrangler, the free version.) Then copy and paste that into my word document. Annoying but it works for me.

I believe there are a number of clipboard utilities that will do what you ask. A quick visit to macupdate.com should help with that.