Whenever I copy text from a website and then paste it into an email or another program, the text is formatted just like it was on the website--large text, wrong font, unexpected line breaks, all that. How can I strip all of that formatting and just keep the text that I copied?

You’ve stumbled upon one of the features of Mac OS X, which lets you copy and paste styled text from one application to another. This is a real boon when you want to keep the formatting intact, but it can slow you down when you want to strip out the unwanted formatting.

Some programs, like Clean Text ($24.95, www.apimac.com) and SmartWrap ($18, www.selznick.com), give you the ability to quickly reformat text into just the words themselves. These programs also offer additional features, such as stripping out quoting characters (>) from email messages, removing bullets from lists, capitalizing sentences in the format that you specify, and much more.

We changed the Command-V keyboard shortcut in all of our commonly used programs to paste text without any of its previous formatting coming along for the ride.

For bare-bones format-stripping, open TextEdit (in your Applications folder), paste the text in, and then select Format > Make Plain Text (Shift-Command-T). This converts your rich text to plain text, which has no formatting by definition.

You can also try your word-processing application of choice--click the Edit menu and look underneath the Paste command for something like “Paste with Current Style” or “Paste and Match Style.” Choosing that will paste in the text, strip out its old formatting, and apply your current formatting--all in one fell swoop.

The keyboard shortcut for this varies from one application to the next, and it’s usually some complicated shortcut that requires you to twist four fingers around the keyboard. But you can always reassign a more memorable shortcut by going into System Preferences > Keyboard, choosing Keyboard Shortcuts, and reassigning the Command-V shortcut within your favorite applications.