Copy/Paste with "Keep Source Formatting" does not work without including the end of line

Question

If you have text in Word which is not the "Normal" style and paste using Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V or Copy/Paste Special (Keep Source Formatting), the pasted text will be pasted in the "Normal" format (rather than the source format) unless the end-of-line is included in the copy selection.

A picture to illustrate:

In both cases, Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V or Copy/Paste Special (Keep Source Formatting) produce the same results. Until very recently, the bottom example would have produced the same results as the top. I believe that this is a bug and that both should produce the result of the top example.

I marked this for Home, but I have seen the same issue on Word for business.

Answer 1

The behavior you detail is not a bug.

If you turn on the display of non-printing characters, you will see that in your first example the selection includes the Pilcrow that signifies the end of the paragraph. The formatting is contained in that Pilcrow and without it, the source formatting will not be respected.

If previously the source formatting appeared to be maintained in the second instance, it would be because the format of the destination was the same as that of the source.

Answer 2

Thank you for explaining. It kind of makes sense, but still also seems counterintuitive that it would only work that way. I'm surprised I didn't notice this before.

Thanks again for clearing things up.

Answer 3

I should clarify the situation. If the copied text has had direct formatting applied to it (e.g. bold, italic, change of font name, color or size) that formatting will be retained if the Keep Source Formatting option is selected when the selected text does not include the end of paragraph mark.