PureText is a little Windows program that performs an essential function: it will paste your text as plain text. No formatting, no nothing.

PureText only removes rich formatting from text. This includes the font face, font style (bold, italics, etc.), font color, paragraph styles (left/right/center aligned), margins, character spacing, bullets, subscript, superscript, tables, charts, pictures, embedded objects, etc. However, it does not modify the actual text. It will not remove or fix new-lines, carriage returns, tabs, or other white-space. It will not fix word-wrap or clean up your paragraphs. If you copy the source code of a web page to the clipboard, it is not going to remove all the HTML tags. If you copy text from an actual web page (not the source of the page), it will remove the formatting.

PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY. The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically.

It works in Word and Excel, which is great, because I'm constantly either 1) opening EditPad, pasting my text, and then re-copying it to remove all formatting, and 2) using the Paste Special > Values function in Excel, for which there is unfortunately no hotkey. Now I have Fn+V set to invoke PureText (you can set your own hotkey) and I've shaved milliseconds off my workday, which I can then use to blog. Everyone benefits. Found on Gadgetopia.