Moving text between applications can be a pain, especially if it doesn’t come in the format I need. So when I saw the Advanced Paste feature in PowerToys, I immediately got excited about how it would transform my workflow. Not many people are talking about it, so I thought I’d highlight some examples of how it makes text formatting a breeze.
Advanced Paste is essentially a smarter replacement for the standard clipboard. It gives you more control over how you want the pasted content to look when it lands on the page. You can strip all formatting or convert it to Markdown or JSON. I have found that this one feature saves me hours of work because it removes a lot of headaches of doing it manually.
- OS
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Windows
- Developer
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Microsoft Corporation
- Pricing model
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Free, Open-source
Microsoft PowerToys is a set of free Microsoft Windows utilities for power users to tune and streamline their Windows experience for greater productivity.
For Advanced Paste to work, ensure it is enabled. To do that, open PowerToys, go to System Tools -> Advanced Paste, and toggle on Advanced Paste.
Pasting as plain text
A great way to get rid of unwanted formatting
When doing research, I like copying content from websites and pasting it into Word or Google Docs. What I do not like is dealing with all the extra formatting that comes with it. Most of the time, I have to deal with varying fonts, background colors, and hyperlinks. It’s frustrating when all I’m looking for is plain text.
Advanced Paste has an option that removes all unnecessary formatting. Once you use it, the text will inherit whatever format the destination app is using. I can hear you wondering why I don’t just use the Ctrl + Shift + V shortcut. While it is indeed quicker, it doesn’t work universally (e.g., in older versions of Microsoft Word). Using Advanced Paste is a much safer option.
To use it, copy anything to the clipboard like you normally would: Ctrl + C or Right-click -> Copy. Afterward, position the cursor where you want to paste the text, press Win + Shift + V to open the Advanced Paste window, and then click Paste as plain text.
If you want to bypass the Advanced Paste window, you can assign a shortcut to the Paste as plain text option. Go to the Actions section in the Advanced Paste tab, click Assign shortcut next to Paste as plain text directly, and set your shortcut. If it already has a shortcut and you want to change it, click the pencil icon instead. That makes pasting plain text as quick as using the Ctrl + Shift + V shortcut.
Converting text to Markdown
Useful for creating a structured document
Advanced Paste’s option to paste text as Markdown is nothing short of brilliant, in my opinion. When I got a Word document with sections I wanted to insert into Google Docs, I used to paste them as plain text and then do the necessary formatting afterward. Word has different styling for elements like headers, links, and tables that can make a Google Docs document look awkward when pasted directly.
Now that Google Docs supports Markdown editing, Advanced Paste makes it easier to copy formatted text (from Microsoft Word or a website) and paste it as Markdown. It is not only useful for Google Docs, but for everything else that supports Markdown, including Obsidian, Notion, Notepad, VS Code, and even GitHub repositories.
This is the only Markdown editor I’ll ever use on Windows
I’ve written over a thousand articles across three Markdown editors; here’s my current one.
Just like with pasting plain text, you need to bring up the Advanced Paste window (Win + Shift + V) and click Paste as markdown. As soon as you do, Advanced Paste will intelligently convert the structure of the copied content into Markdown, saving you a lot of tedious, manual, and error-prone work.
You can also assign the Paste as markdown option to a shortcut so you can paste text as Markdown much faster. Just access the Advanced Paste tab in PowerToys, scroll to the Actions section, and click Assign shortcut next to Paste as markdown directly.
It can also convert text to JSON
It also does HTML
Markdown conversion is impressive, but once I saw the JSON conversion feature in Advanced Paste, I knew it was offering something genuinely new. JSON is another lightweight text format for storing and exchanging structured data, whether it’s a list, a table, or a set of key-value pairs. JSON is stricter than Markdown, requiring correct brackets, quotes, and nesting. I was pleasantly surprised that Advanced Paste can intelligently parse copied text into valid JSON.
While JSON is mostly used by developers, the average person can certainly get the most use out of it, too. Many of the programs we use for productivity have the option to import JSON files. One of the best examples that comes to mind is importing data into Excel using Power Query. If you get sales data in plain text, you can use Advanced Paste to convert it to JSON, and then import it into Excel using the Get Data feature.
I stopped copy-pasting data in Excel after I found this “Unpivot” button
Unpivoting data is so easy!
To convert text you’ve copied into JSON using Advanced Paste, press Win + Shift + V and click Paste as JSON. Don’t forget to assign it a shortcut if you want to make the process faster.
You can also paste the copied text as HTML, the markup language used to structure websites. You have to enable this option in PowerToys first by accessing the Advanced Paste tab and toggling on Paste as .html file in the Actions section. Afterward, you will see it in the Advanced Paste window.
More ways to paste text are good
Advanced Paste offers more options than these. For instance, it also supports using AI, allowing you to format text using natural language processing. You can pick a model like ChatGPT or Gemini, or you can use a local LLM (the available options right now are Foundry Local and Ollama). Just be mindful that the online models will require an API key. So, if those options don’t suit you, you can use AI models to convert text into the desired format.
