It's amazing that Microsoft works so hard on this bs, but does zero to have Excel support copying newline separated (or comma separated, otherwise clearly dilineated) text pop into Excel properly on paste, something that would actually be useful!
Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
41–50 of 187 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
#42Many users, and maybe most outside HN, either: * don't care about the misformatting * actually want the red font and underlining from the web page they're copying from.
They want the red font more often than they just want the text, and don't get annoyed when their email now is all in red Impact font? These oft-mentioned mythical users that have opposite expectations from their computer than us are a bit like the Sasquatch. Some say they've seen them, but I still don't believe it. :-)
Hardly sasquatch. It's extremely common where I work. Your experience simply isn't representative of the population.
Also these days clients don't have much of a problem handling things. I don't know exactly when, but at some point I went from not being able to paste excel into an email without it being unusably messy to having it paste nearly perfectly on formatting.
Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
#43It's tough because you don't want the formatting...until you. If I'm editing text that has a few bolded words I'd be immediately annoyed if the pasted text didn't have the bolded instances.
Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
>the vast majority of users want to paste with formatting Oh, I highly doubt this is the case.
If you're moving sections around in a spreadsheet or a word processor, would it be more annoying if the copy/paste kept the formatting or stripped the formatting?
Within the same application and document, it can make sense. That's not what people are raging about though.
Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
#45THIS!
I hate myself each time I'm using LibreOffice just for this reason, why the hell would that be the norm?
Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
#46It seems most of my posts here end up being a complaint about MS Teams. So here is another. Teams will happily take the formatting of "black text" from copying from Word for example. But anyone who is using a dark theme on Teams now can't read it because it "intelligently" kept the formatting that didn't even matter because it was just "plain back text". Had it been copied from something that didn't specify that formatting, it would have just worked.
Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
>the vast majority of users want to paste with formatting Oh, I highly doubt this is the case.
If you're moving sections around in a spreadsheet or a word processor, would it be more annoying if the copy/paste kept the formatting or stripped the formatting?
I think it depends on your workflow -- I'd tend to assume the receiving end has some formatting, and it would be best if the copied text was fit that formatting, rather than bringing formatting with it. Ultimately though it seems pretty arbitrary, I guess they just went with the default that benefits what they assumed would be the most popular workflow.
I dunno, we should all just use LaTeX to avoid these kinds of issues.
Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
#48>It makes absolutely no sense that anyone would want to transplant styling/formatting into an email I do it all the time when I need to email a small table from excel instead of attaching the whole sheet, especially when it's backed by data that should never be sent in an email. It works fine. I used to not be able to do this. Content didn't paste nicely, or recipient clients didn't display it nicely. These days it's…
Copying a table is one thing, copying font style is another, I think.
Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
#49In many, but not all programs on windows you can paste plain text by using ctrl+shift+v. Outlook desktop is one of the few places where this hotkey does not work. Before I knew there was a native hotkey combo, I created a autohotkey script that would do that and had a mini-tutorial that showed how. https://forum.digikey.com/t/add-a-digi-key-search-hotkey-eve...
On Mac you can do shift+option+command+v to paste with formatting removed.
Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
#50I like the option. If I want the formatting stripped I paste the text into notepad++, then copy that text. Otherwise I get all the formatting and don't need to reapply it.