I was pasting data from a web page into an Excel spreadsheet, and I wanted to make everything have a consistent style. The function I used to do this is right-click -> Paste Special -> Text. This “inserts the contents of the Clipboard as text without any formatting” — exactly what I wanted. But it was a waste of time and effort to go through the Paste Special dialog box every time. There had to be a faster, better way… but it wasn’t obvious. After a quick Google search, I found this excellent way to do it:
First, prep for the paste. Go and copy some data, and select a cell in the spreadsheet. Then, go to:
Tools -> Macro -> Macros…
Give it the info it wants, and make the shortcut ctrl+v, if you want it to replace your usual paste shortcut. Hit record, and then use the menus to do a Paste Special as you normally would. Stop the recording.
Done! Now you can paste as usual, but without any of the extraneous ugly formatting.
