By default, Outlook will preserve source text formatting during copy/paste operations. At times this can be very annoying, especially when composing emails of technical nature. There’s a good chance your email will end up looking like the front page of a tabloid. Good news: there’s a simple way to tell Outlook to ignore formatting and paste text-only.

Instructions below should work for Outlook 2010 and newer. Start Outlook, open a new email message. On the “Message” tab click on the “Paste” drop-down and select “Set Default Paste…”, as shown below.

From the left-hand menu select “Advanced” and scroll down a little to the “Cut, Copy, and Paste” section. Set all four copy/paste actions to “Keep Text Only” and click “OK”. See the screenshot below.