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Comment by thrower123 | Hacker News Reader

The inconsistency in the way copy/paste works just inside of Outlook is maddening.

Copy text and an image from an email? Images paste in all broken.

Copy just the image from the email? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Copy the image from the email, paste it into Paint, crop the canvas, then copy from Paint into whatever? Works every time.

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I have the habit of "washing" everything with Notepad to get rid of inconsistencies:

Copy text, data, etc from wherever

Paste it into Notepad

Copy it again

Paste it where you want it and then apply any formatting according to the destination app's formatting rules

Not a great workaround but at least it works.

I used to do that and then I learnt about Crt + Shift + v. That pastes the text without any formatting.

In Windows programs another shortcut for unformatted text is Control Alt V where Control Shift V does not work

https://superuser.com/questions/407113/shortcut-in-word-or-e...

That used to work in Google sheets, but now it only pastes the last thing copied from Google sheets. Really frustrating.

That's broken in Outlook 2108. Now they want you to paste (CTRL+V) and then hold CTRL and click on/navigate to the obscure icon for the paste variant you want.

Ctrl+Shift+V is great, when it works. Which it doesn't annoyingly often, such as Atlassian's Confluence wiki. So I paste and re-copy things in the URL bar all the time. Ctrl + L V A X

Ah yes - the "sheepdip" as we call it

FWIW, this is necessary in linux and android too.

> I have the habit of "washing" everything with Notepad to get rid of inconsistencies

I also do that. I 100% attribute that to browsers and people who want to copy/paste HTML and have it all colorized and formatted in the destination app.

Excel is even worse. Perform any action between the time you copy and the time you paste and everything on your clipboard is lost.

Excel is insane, the undo button is universal, meaning if you are editing multiple spreadsheets, you can’t just undo changes to one of them if you made a mistake between editing, you have to undo all changes to all open spreadsheets to get back to your desired undo point.

Yeah, this is so unproductive, it boggles the mind.

Oh god this is one feature that literally makes me want to jump on a plane to Redmond and throw my own excrement at them like a deranged chimpanzee.

Joel Spolsky used to work on Excel and he has written some brilliant stuff about it (at least, in its early days). My personal favourite is the revelation that the Excel team had their own C compiler, which kind of takes Not Invented Here into the stratosphere.

This is why I always open up multiple instances of Excel.

It's still an MDI app under the covers (not that that's any excuse).

Yeah this really sucks. Fortunately I'm largely away from the spreadsheet world. My motto is stay as far away from business as you can and have a happy life.

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