Remove Text Formatting
Paste text from Word, a web page, an email or a PDF and get plain text back, with the fonts, colors and links gone. Four options tidy what is left: extra spaces, line breaks, curly quotes and dashes, and the invisible characters that cause trouble later. A before and after count shows what was removed, and nothing leaves your browser.
Why This Tool Matters
Copying text rarely copies only text. A paragraph lifted from a Word document arrives in a content management system with its own font and size. A quote pasted from a web page brings a link style, and an email thread pasted into a form carries stray indentation. Underneath that, text copied from PDFs and chat tools often contains characters you cannot see: non-breaking spaces that make a search miss, zero-width characters that make two identical-looking usernames different, and soft hyphens that appear mid-word later.
This tool reads only the plain-text version of what you paste, which discards the formatting at once, then lets you decide how much further to go. Straightening curly quotes and dashes matters for code, spreadsheets and plain-text email, where a “ is not a ". Turning off Keep line breaks joins hard-wrapped lines into a single paragraph. The counts show how many characters came out, so a result that looks identical is still visibly different.
How to Use
- 01
Paste your text
Paste into the box, or type. If formatting came along, a note confirms it was left behind.
- 02
Choose what else to clean
Toggle collapsing spaces, keeping line breaks, straightening quotes and dashes, and stripping invisible characters.
- 03
Copy the plain text
Copy the result, and check the before and after counts to see what was removed.
More Text Tools
- Only need to clean up spacing? Try Remove Spaces from Text
- Joining hard-wrapped lines? Try Remove Line Breaks
- Got raw markup instead of pasted text? Try Remove HTML Tags
- Want emoji gone as well? Try Remove Emojis from Text
- Browse all Text Cleanup Tools
- Need to change letter case next? Try the full Case Converter
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I remove formatting in Microsoft Word?
Select the text (Ctrl+A for everything), then press Ctrl+Space to clear character formatting, or use the Clear All Formatting button in the Font group on the Home tab. When pasting, open the Paste Options menu and choose Keep Text Only, or use Paste Special (Ctrl+Alt+V) and pick Unformatted Text. Ctrl+Shift+N applies the Normal style to paragraphs.
How do I remove formatting in Google Docs?
Select the text and press Ctrl+\ (Cmd+\ on Mac), or choose Format → Clear formatting. To paste without bringing styles in, use Ctrl+Shift+V (Cmd+Shift+V on Mac), which pastes without formatting.
How do I paste as plain text in a browser or on a Mac?
In Chrome, Edge and Firefox, press Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows and Linux, or Cmd+Shift+V on a Mac. In Safari and Apple apps such as Mail and Pages, the equivalent is Option+Shift+Cmd+V, Paste and Match Style. These shortcuts handle the next paste only, whereas this tool also cleans quotes, spaces and hidden characters.
Which invisible characters does it remove?
Zero-width space, word joiner, the byte-order mark, soft hyphens and the left-to-right and right-to-left direction marks are removed, and non-breaking and other special spaces become normal spaces. It deliberately keeps zero-width joiners and non-joiners, because removing them would break emoji such as 👨👩👧 and the correct shaping of scripts such as Persian and Hindi.
Does it keep tables, images and links?
No. Only the text survives. Images are dropped, a link keeps its visible words but not its address, and a table becomes the text of its cells, usually separated by tabs or line breaks depending on the source. If you need to keep a table's structure, copy it into a spreadsheet instead.
Is the text I paste sent anywhere?
No. The pasted text is read and cleaned in your browser, and nothing is uploaded or stored, so it is safe for drafts and confidential documents.