Problem Solving | 15 Mar 2008 | Print  | Listen   | Recommend?

Updated Paste Plain Text AppleScript for Word 2008

by Joe Kissell

In "Word 2008 and the Paste Plain Text Dance" (2008-01-19), I described a tiny AppleScript I use in Word 2008 to paste text without style information, so that the pasted text adopts the style of whatever is around it. From the feedback I've received, the lack of a built-in command to do this with one click had irritated quite a few people. Since then, I've found that very occasionally - I can't quite discern a pattern to why or when - text pasted with my script takes on the default font of Word's Normal template (Cambria), rather than the actual font of the surrounding text.

So I experimented further, and I've come up with a revised script that not only solves this problem but takes an entirely different approach that results in a shorter and more elegant solution. Thus far I haven't seen any occasions in which the new script fails. As before, you can either paste this into Script Editor or download the completed script, unzip it, and put it in ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Word Script Menu Items. Here's the script:

tell application "Microsoft Word"
    tell selection
        try
            set theClip to Unicode text of (the clipboard as record)
            type text text theClip
        end try
    end tell
end tell

Now, instead of counting the number of characters on the clipboard and moving the insertion point, the script uses the "type text" command to simulate typing, which automatically puts the insertion point in the right place.

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