George MacKerron: code blog

You might have noticed that Microsoft has lately started making available time-limited Virtual PC images of Windows installations with (separately) Internet Explorer versions 6, 7 and 8.

This is brilliant for Mac users who need to test websites in IE, because you get a real installation of each browser in its home environment, with the right JavaScript engine and working conditional comments, plug-ins, Windows Media Player, and so on. With the alternatives, such as running under Wine or using Multiple IEs in a single Windows virtual machine, one or more of these things tends to be missing.

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iWork and some other Mac apps provide the keyboard shortcut Apple-Alt-Shift-V for the extremely useful command Edit > Paste and match style. But Office 2008 provides no such equivalent for its equivalent command, Edit > Paste > Unformatted Text > OK. Annoying.

Happily, you can fix this with a strategically named and placed AppleScript. Open /Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor, and paste in the following lines:

tell application "Microsoft Word" 
  paste special (text object of selection) data type paste text
end tell

Save in /Users/YourUserName/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Word Script Menu Items as Paste unformatted\mosV.scpt (the backslashed bit at the end of the filename provides the shortcut). Restart Word and you can now paste without importing extraneous styles with Apple-Alt-Shift-V.

Update

You might also try this alternative approach (via a handy comment elsewhere):

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

This has the advantage of leaving the cursor where you expect, at the end of the pasted text — the original script fragment leaves it at the beginning. And no, type text text is sadly not a typo: that’s really how Word likes to be addressed.