Plaintext

While wrestling my slides into shape for BMC Engage, I saw this:

“If you would like to copy and paste text into this document, please paste as text-only or paste into Notepad first to clear styles.”

- In a template for some 451 documents. It’s 2014, and this is pretty much where all the white-collar workers are. That whole “plain text and markdown” rebellion you see among tech-separatists is a weird reaction, but almost an isolationist response to the weirdness of Word.

Who ever, in the history of anything, wanted to preserve formatting when pasting? Nobody, that’s who. You always want the format of the destination.

PowerPoint is the worst offender, ignoring the “paste as plain text” option that everything else uses. Of course PowerPoint is also where it is most obvious if the formatting is off. So now I have to paste into TextWrangler1, copy back out of there, and finally paste into PowerPoint.

The future is stupid.

  1. BBEdit’s little brother. Check it out. ↩