Maybe it’s just me.
Maybe I’ve been under a corner of the Internet rock that has caused me to overlook this WordPress Post Editor feature. But ever since I’ve found this wonderful button, I’ve found copying and pasting formatted text—from both word processors and websites—a whole lot easier!
Let me show you.
Clear Formatting
Are you familiar with the “Clear Formatting” button in the Editor? If so, I commend you and apologize for having been so daft to overlook this golden nugget. For the rest of you, share in my new found joy!
If you want to copy URL text from a website or word processor, simply copy the text as usual:
As you can see in the screenshot above, I want to copy and paste the Insert Image text from the Wes Molebash Draws Stuff podcast page.
After copying it, let’s paste it into the WordPress Editor:
Easy enough. I am sure you’ve done this plenty of times.
If we look closer, however, and use the Text view to see the HTML, we find that we also copied and pasted the CSS styling as pictured here:
Depending on where you copy it from, this can be a real downer. If you’ve copied it from your own blog, everything will look normal until you change your color scheme and all your old blog posts links have a different CSS style. If you copy this over from a word processing document, you may even find more formatting trapped in the HTML. Also, when you copy and paste text, it can effect more than just links, so bear that in mind whenever you are copying and pasting straight into the WordPress Post Editor.
I imagine you can see where this is leading.
Highlight any and all text that you want to remove the formatting and click the “Clear formatting” button:
Boom!
Magic just happened.
Take a look at what this did to the HTML by clicking back over to the Text view:
Nice and clean!
I just love this feature. 🙂
I hope some of you found this helpful!
🙂
bruce says
try ctrl+shift+v or cmd+shift+v to paste without formatting, quicker and works everywhere!
Eric Dye says
Yes, that’s a good trick, too; HOWEVER, that will also strip out the URL, whereas this will not. 🙂
Jason D. says
Wow, nice! I knew of the strip formatting button and shortcut but that one I never new about… nice gem!
Eric Dye says
Yup. Pretty nifty. 🙂
Jonathan Ober says
Have you noticed that if you have an email address in text on a page or post and highlight it and go to add the link WordPress 4.0 and 4.0.1 will replace it with the mailto hyperlink?
Eric Dye says
No I hadn’t. That’s awesome!