Sanitize Your Clipboard Text
I'm guessing this is mostly a geek problem, but I frequently find myself starting up NOTEPAD, pasting in some formatted text, selecting all of the now-unformatted text, copying it again, and pasting it into some other application. Does this sound familiar? I don't know how many times I've wished for a special paste command that would automatically remove all of the text formatting for me. I seem to need it most when pasting to .Text, FrontPage, or Word.
To alleviate this frustration, I figured it was finally time to write a small utility, so I fired up Visual Studio 2005 and wrote a simple proof-of-concept. Right after I had something functional, I decided to search the internet to see if someone else might have written a similar tool. I don't know why I didn't do this first. Turns out that there are a few solutions, and after trying them, I've decided that I like the simplicity and functionality of Steve Miller's PureText. It's a single EXE that you can put anywhere you'd like, it lives in the system tray, and a simple click of the icon automatically sanitizes your clipboard text. Or, if you don't want to click the icon, you can simply press Windows+V (customizable) to sanitize and paste in a single step. Simple and beautiful.
I wish I had seen Duncan Mackenzie's post back in August...or quite frankly, about 10 years ago.
