Plain Text

Plain text is about as exciting as dry toast, but can be necessary part of using the same text in multiple places.  It's like Mini-Wheats with no 'frosting'.  

Every word processor uses its own background coding that is used for formatting.  There are some programs that do not play well with each other with formatting, even simple items like Return, Bold, and italics.

Here are some ways to quickly clear out the text formatting that you may difficulty with when copying/pasting between different programs:

A little note first...  Beware that this will clear out any formatting, including web links.

Using TextEdit:

This is in your Applications folder.  It is a primitive word processor that come with every Mac.  

Begin by pasting your text into a new TextEdit document.

Go to Format -> Make Plain Text  to remove all formatting.

Using Gmail:

Paste the text into the body of a new email.  

Click on the 'A' in your text editing palette.  Select 'Remove Formatting'

Remember the days of Microsoft Works and Microsoft Word and how they never seemed to work well with each other even though they were created by the same company?  Those issues are much less common now.  

Formatting can also be removed from a Pages document doing this:

 or a Word document by doing this: