[twic]

At least two people want to paste with formatting:

https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/17398-clipboard-history-fe...

I've seen this question asked again and again. Once, i saw an answer from someone who was a product manager on a big office tool, i think at Microsoft. Their answer was that according to their user research, the vast majority of users want to paste with formatting.

Given how often this comes up, and how irritating all programmers evidently find this, i would really love to read a detailed writeup of this feature; its history, how popular it really is, how people use it, etc. It seems likely there's a big story here we're all completely missing.

[asoneth]

I've heard the same, but the story was apocryphal.

Specifically that when they needed to decide which paste style should be the default "Paste" operation it was a combination of user research and a bias towards novice-friendly defaults that led them to pick paste-with-formatting as the default and paste-as-plain-text as the alternative.

I'd also be interested in seeing the actual research and design rationale.

[moralestapia]

>the vast majority of users want to paste with formatting

Oh, I highly doubt this is the case.

[InitialLastName]

If you're moving sections around in a spreadsheet or a word processor, would it be more annoying if the copy/paste kept the formatting or stripped the formatting?

[ghusto]

Within the same application and document, it can make sense. That's not what people are raging about though.

[mohamez]

Exactly!

[bee_rider]

I think it depends on your workflow -- I'd tend to assume the receiving end has some formatting, and it would be best if the copied text was fit that formatting, rather than bringing formatting with it. Ultimately though it seems pretty arbitrary, I guess they just went with the default that benefits what they assumed would be the most popular workflow.

I dunno, we should all just use LaTeX to avoid these kinds of issues.

[wintermutestwin]

In a spreadsheet or word processor, you have Paste Special which allows you to be granular about what formatting, etc comes over with the paste.

[Gibbon1]

I don't doubt they want to. That's not the same as they should. I think actually you have three groups.

  1. Most of the people on this thread that want default text. 
  2. People that carefully format documents.
  3. Idiots.

The first two find copying the style over to be super annoying. Both have to remove it as a second step. The last don't know any better. That latter group is much larger than the first two.

[lucisferre]

I think you overestimate the majority of users' ability to make good UX decisions.

[celdon25]

How does that affect whether they will be annoyed or not when they paste something and it includes formatting that has to be removed?

[twic]

On what basis do you doubt it?