GUI Bloopers: Paste Special

So in case you haven’t seen it, “Paste Special” is a common feature in many applications that support rich content of one form or another. The intent is that, instead of having the application decide (based on the available content types of the object in the paste buffer) the best format to use when pasting, … Continue reading “GUI Bloopers: Paste Special”

So in case you haven’t seen it, “Paste Special” is a common feature in many applications that support rich content of one form or another. The intent is that, instead of having the application decide (based on the available content types of the object in the paste buffer) the best format to use when pasting, it offers the user a dialog with a range of available formats, something like this:

Paste Special

The typical behavior, in this case, is to open the dialog with the format that would have been chosen if the user had simply picked “Paste” already selected. I guess this is done so that, if the user hits return when the dialog opens, they will get the same behavior as Paste provides. The thing is though, no one who opens that dialog ever wants that behavior. The only reason why a user would go through the extra pain of the dialog is because they want to paste in some way that is not the default, so in point of fact, picking any other choice would be better than picking the one that does what Paste would do.

The question is then, what should the dialog have as the default selection?

In 99.9% of the times Paste Special is used, the intent is to remove any rich formatting from the content in the paste buffer, so that it can pick up the surrounding formatting of its destination. Given that, when there are multiple possible formats, always pick the “plainest” one. So, for example, in the above dialog, it should have “Unformatted text” selected by default.

Of course, as usual, the Apple guys have understood the underlying problem better. Instead of a Paste Special command, in Pages I get this…

Match Styles

… which does what you (almost always) actually want, without putting up a dialog at all.

2 thoughts on “GUI Bloopers: Paste Special”

  1. “Paste and Match Style” … what a completely reasonable thing to offer. I keep MS notepad handy for exactly that – pasting to denude it of format, recopy, then paste in the other app so I don’t end up with mismatched formatting. What a pain. Actually I rarely if ever want to retain formatting when pasting across applications.

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