Paste Special with Hyphens

[Idaho Word Man]

I often use the "Paste Special - Unformatted Text" option to make sure I
don't paste any unwanted styles or formatting into my documents. However, if
the text to be pasted contains non-breaking hyphens, they are pasted in as
spaces. This causes me untold grief, since all our document numbers contain
hyphens.

Wouldn't it make more sense to make non-breaking hyphens come across as
hyphens instead of spaces?


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[Jean-Guy Marcil]

I often use the "Paste Special - Unformatted Text" option to make sure I
don't paste any unwanted styles or formatting into my documents. However, if
the text to be pasted contains non-breaking hyphens, they are pasted in as
spaces. This causes me untold grief, since all our document numbers contain
hyphens.

Wouldn't it make more sense to make non-breaking hyphens come across as
hyphens instead of spaces?

If you are pasting from another Word document, what I always do is
SHIFT-CTRL-N to my selection in the source document, followed by CTRL-C and
CTRL-Z. Basically, I apply the Normal Style, copy and undo the application of
the Normal Style. If you are worried about character styles as well, do
CTRL-Spacebar before the CTRL-C and then do two CTRL-Z. This will remove
character styles (but it will also remove all bold/Italic/Undereline etc.
information becasue CTRL-Spacebar resets font attributes.

Finish with a simple CTRL-V in the target document. This way, you are
pasting from Normal to Normal and not importing any unwanted styles (Which is
why I do it this way). It is very fast once you are used to it.

If you are pasting from another application or the Web, you could first
paste into a scratch document, and then do as I outline above from that
scratch document to your target document.

This should preserve all your special charaters.