[ineedasername]

>It makes absolutely no sense that anyone would want to transplant styling/formatting into an email

I do it all the time when I need to email a small table from excel instead of attaching the whole sheet, especially when it's backed by data that should never be sent in an email. It works fine.

I used to not be able to do this. Content didn't paste nicely, or recipient clients didn't display it nicely. These days it's no longer an issue, clients mostly seem to handle it without issue.

[Steltek]

This highlights my true desire: I want to copy structure, not specific font choices. Or in other words, I want the HTML tags but not the CSS.

Rich paste annoys me most when the content I paste has a different notion of what plain paragraph words should look like. And "ctrl-shift-v" isn't helpful if you're trying to paste in a list or something.

[strongpigeon]

Some of the copying of font style makes a bit more sense if you consider that Outlook used (still use?) Wingding to display smiley faces. Now whether they should have done that in the first place is another question, but for the sake of back compatibility I can see why it's important to keep.

[boardwaalk]

Copying a table is one thing, copying font style is another, I think.

[ineedasername]

formatting comes with it. I do a lot of formatting to make things more user friendly & readable. Otherwise it just looks like a wall of text & numbers.

Edit: my preference, if it's something that has to be reusable, is to do all of this sort of thing with tools that make the end result self-service & automated. But there's a lot of one-off work too, and more complex analysis usually takes place in a stats program or R or Python, and it's much easier to paste some output from there into excel and do some nice formatting quickly rather than coding it all in a way that would make it production-ready.

[marcosdumay]

That's why the option exists. But a vast majority of the cases, it's harmful, not helpful, so it shouldn't be the default.

[ineedasername]

Oh, definitely. Folks that say there isn't a frequent use case for format pasting are simply working under different conditions. But while I use it frequently, it's probably more common for me to just want plain text and I would prefer that to be the default.

[AyyWS]

This is the one time keeping format is useful. I still frequently have to paste a table or graph as an image, because it still changes on paste.