I hardly ever want to paste with formatting when copying into Word 2016 or Excel 2016 (seriously, who wants fonts when copying into a spreadsheet?). Is there a way to set the default paste to paste text only when I hit Cmd+V?
Way to make paste as text only the default action in Office 2016
ms office
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Found it! It's a setting under Preferences > Edit:
Extend data range formats and formulas
Misread it as "date ranges" on the first trawl through preferences. Turning it off stops this happening.
The comment about formulas seems to only mean that it doesn't fill empty cells with formulas when it thinks it's seen a pattern. After turning it off, it still does other automatic format adjustment e.g. incrementing formulas copied across a range:
The best answer to this issue appears here: Excel 2011 copy and paste beach ball hang issue.
Essentially:
You need to do this every time you freshly open the Excel program.
On starting up Excel, and before opening your Excel spreadsheet, open a new blank Excel spreadsheet.
Perform a single copy and paste of an empty cell into another cell.
Do this twice. Doing it twice is important.
Close that spreadsheet, and without quitting Excel, open the spreadsheet you want to work on.
The problem should now not occur.
It seems that when a copy and paste is performed the first two times, Excel tries to do some mapping of all the relationships in the spreadsheet, and due to some coding issue, gets caught up in some long loops. Doing two copy and pastes first, with no big spreadsheets open satisfies this process with no vast spreadsheet to work through. Hence it avoids the long delay and apparent hang.
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Best Answer
In a roundabout fashion yes, mostly...
In MS Office their version of "Paste as plain text" is called "Paste and Match Style and uses the macOS system defaults (OptionCommandShiftV) for paste as plain text for that function.
Now if you don't want to have to do that four finger salute just to paste (essentially) plain text, you can change the menu shortcuts in any application via the Keyboard Preference pane.
In this example I reassigned "Paste" to OptionCommandShift V. And "Paste and match Formatting" to CommandV.
I didn't do this for all applications as I don't want to chance messing up the behavior of other applications that you can copy/paste with.
NOTE that this is not really "paste plain text" but will give you at least some of that functionality with very little pain.
To really get paste plain text in an MS Office application you would likely need something that could capture a regular paste command and then select the plain text icon from the formatting menu that pops up at the insertion point after you paste. There may be a macro program out there that can do that but I am unaware of any specific ones with that functionality.