Copy Paste Formatting Keyboard Shortcut No Longer Working

Anonymous
2024-08-16T13:22:09+00:00

To my team's great chagrin and frustration, Microsoft has reassigned the format copying and pasting shortcuts we used very regularly. This happened a month ago, but we all recently discussed how angry we were about losing this feature so I wanted to make sure this was raised as an issue somewhere.

We work in MS Office across the typical suite: Outlook, Word, PPT, and Excel. While Excel seems unaffected, Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint have lost this feature, which we used prolifically. We do an awful lot of hyper-time-sensitive document creation and editing, and it was a major time saver for us power users. We have had to adapt to using the mouse again, a slower tool to interact with.

RIP Ctrl-Shift-C / Ctrl-Shift-V.

I can't imagine why people would want to record a video clip of themselves with that hotkey. I am sure one could dream up another key combination for that. How about Ctrl-Shift-R, or Ctrl-Alt-R?

Please restore the original function. This change has lowered our productivity and increased our antipathy towards Microsoft's products.

Sincerely,

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For business | Windows

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Jay Freedman 208.3K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
2024-08-16T20:43:13+00:00

Please restore the original function. This change has lowered our productivity and increased our antipathy towards Microsoft's products.

You can restore the previous shortcuts yourself (each user will need to do this, only once).

  • In Word, click File > Options > Customize Ribbon. At the bottom of the page, click the Keyboard Shortcuts: Customize button.
  • In the Customize Keyboard dialog (shown in Stefan Blom's post), click the All Commands item near the bottom of the Categories list. Then scroll the Commands list and click on CopyFormat.
  • Click in the "Press new shortcut key" box and press the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+C. (Do not type the characters, just press the keys.) Note the "Currently assigned to:" line below the Current keys box; it probably says "(unassigned)".
  • Click the Assign button at the bottom left. That puts the shortcut into the Current keys box.
  • Scroll the Commands list and click on PasteFormat.
  • Use the same steps to assign the Ctrl+Shift+V shortcut to the PasteFormat command. When you press the shortcut but before you click the Assign button, the "Currently assigned to:" line says "PasteTextOnly", and clicking Assign now removes that shortcut from the PasteTextOnly command and adds it to PasteFormat instead.
  • (optional) Select the PasteTextOnly command and assign a shortcut of your choice to it.
  • Click the Close button.
  • When you next exit from Word, you may be asked whether to save the Normal.dotm template. If so, click the Save button.

I don't know whether future updates will leave the shortcuts as you set them, or change them again.

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-04-25T17:34:30+00:00

    Stefan - thanks for the feedback link and info on that!

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  2. Anonymous
    2025-04-25T10:09:12+00:00

    Microsoft has working shortcuts for 20 years and now accidentally by mistake of some product manager / developer deprecated them !!! What the hell !!!

    They fixed it 2 months ago and in some newer weekly update of Office 365 original shortcuts started working again.

    But now !!! Funny bug appeared again - after yesterday / last week update from Microsoft, copy-paste of format shortcut again disappear !!!

    This is great example how the product development in Microsoft is going to hell and is totally full of bugs, without proper testing and it is chaotic.

    Dear Microsoft - please do not make users angry otherwise you would like to give your products on a market free of charge :-D

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  3. Anonymous
    2025-04-10T07:30:53+00:00

    Please restore the original function. This change has lowered our productivity and increased our antipathy towards Microsoft's products.

    I am agree with this!!

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  4. Anonymous
    2025-02-28T09:03:16+00:00

    That's clearly what's happening - grr. Oddly, about half the time my Auto Text and Auto Correct gets reset. I'm trying this time to see if saving the normal.dotx in the Word>Startup folder, per Charles Kenyon's suggestion way up above, might maintain it.

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