I am sure most of us have run across this from time to time. You cut and paste from a Word document or an email into another editor of your choosing only to discover that it brought along with it a slew of styles and formatting that you didn’t want.

While some programs or editors have a “paste as text” option, the standard process is to use Notepad as an intermediary – but is that really necessary?

Turns out, it’s not. A handy little utility called PureText adds a windows hot-key combination that removes the rich formatting from the text on your clipboard. With a couple of keystrokes, it does the equivalent of the whole Notepad dance behind the scenes and gives you nice clean text in your active window.

PureText isn’t fancy, but it works and is really quite useful.

PureText is free to use and runs on all flavors of Windows from 95 through Vista.

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