How do I paste as plain text on a Mac?

Press Cmd+Shift+V (Paste and Match Style) in most apps. It pastes text using the destination's formatting instead of the original styling.

What's the plain-text paste shortcut in Microsoft Word for Mac?

Word uses Cmd+Option+Shift+V, or Edit → Paste Special. The native Cmd+Shift+V may not strip formatting there.

Is Paste and Match Style the same as plain text?

Nearly. It strips the source styling and applies the destination's formatting, which gives a plain-text result in practice.

Can I clean copied text beyond just removing styling?

Yes. A clipboard manager like ClipHistory can run an AI clean transform on a clip to remove stray whitespace, line breaks, and invisible characters, using your own provider key.

How to Paste as Plain Text on Mac

Pasting as plain text means dropping in just the words — no fonts, colors, sizes, or links carried over from the source. Here is how to do it reliably across macOS.

The fastest way: Paste and Match Style

Cmd+Shift+V

This is the built-in "Paste and Match Style" command. It pastes the copied text using the formatting of wherever you are pasting, instead of the styling it came with. It works in Pages, Notes, Mail, Keynote, and most native macOS apps.

It is technically "match style" rather than pure plain text, but in practice the result is the same: clean text that fits its new home.

App-by-app variations

Not every app uses the same combination:

Pages, Notes, Mail, Keynote: Cmd+Shift+V
Microsoft Word: Cmd+Option+Shift+V (or Edit → Paste Special)
Google Docs (in a browser): Cmd+Shift+V
Some browsers/web editors: Cmd+Option+Shift+V

When in doubt, open the app's Edit menu and look for "Paste and Match Style" or "Paste Without Formatting" — the listed shortcut is the one that app actually uses.

Make plain text the default everywhere

If you almost always want plain text, two options reduce the friction.

A system text-replacement or remap

You can remap shortcuts so the plain-text paste sits under a key you prefer, using System Settings → Keyboard, or per-app shortcut overrides. This keeps your habit consistent across apps that use different defaults.

A clipboard manager that cleans clips

A clipboard manager gives you a history of everything you copy and lets you reshape clips before pasting. ClipHistory keeps your last 150 unpinned clips plus unlimited pinned ones, opened with Cmd+Shift+V. From the history you can run an AI clean transform to strip formatting and artifacts, or rewrite, summarize, and translate a clip — each using your own API key from Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Google, or a custom endpoint.

When match-style is not enough

Cmd+Shift+V strips visual styling, but it does not fix problems baked into the text — double spaces, hard line breaks pasted from a PDF, or invisible characters from a web page. For those, an AI clean transform does more than match-style can: it normalizes the actual content, not just its appearance.

A typical cleanup flow

Copy the text, formatting and all.
Press Cmd+Shift+V to open ClipHistory.
Run clean on the clip.
Paste the result wherever you need it.

Recap

Cmd+Shift+V pastes as plain text in most Mac apps.
Cmd+Option+Shift+V covers Word and a few others.
The Edit menu confirms the right shortcut per app.
For text with deeper issues, a clipboard manager's clean transform goes further than match-style alone.

ClipHistory stores its history locally — no cloud, no account — and is a one-time $19.99 purchase (12-month license, no auto-renewal), signed and notarized by Apple, on macOS 12+ as a universal binary for Apple Silicon and Intel. Get ClipHistory for macOS.