Copy Paste Formatting Keyboard Shortcut No Longer Working

Question

To my team's great chagrin and frustration, Microsoft has reassigned the format copying and pasting shortcuts we used very regularly. This happened a month ago, but we all recently discussed how angry we were about losing this feature so I wanted to make sure this was raised as an issue somewhere.

We work in MS Office across the typical suite: Outlook, Word, PPT, and Excel. While Excel seems unaffected, Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint have lost this feature, which we used prolifically. We do an awful lot of hyper-time-sensitive document creation and editing, and it was a major time saver for us power users. We have had to adapt to using the mouse again, a slower tool to interact with.

RIP Ctrl-Shift-C / Ctrl-Shift-V.

I can't imagine why people would want to record a video clip of themselves with that hotkey. I am sure one could dream up another key combination for that. How about Ctrl-Shift-R, or Ctrl-Alt-R?

Please restore the original function. This change has lowered our productivity and increased our antipathy towards Microsoft's products.

Sincerely,

Answer 1

Please restore the original function. This change has lowered our productivity and increased our antipathy towards Microsoft's products.

You can restore the previous shortcuts yourself (each user will need to do this, only once).

• In Word, click File > Options > Customize Ribbon. At the bottom of the page, click the Keyboard Shortcuts: Customize button.
• In the Customize Keyboard dialog (shown in Stefan Blom's post), click the All Commands item near the bottom of the Categories list. Then scroll the Commands list and click on CopyFormat.
• Click in the "Press new shortcut key" box and press the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+C. (Do not type the characters, just press the keys.) Note the "Currently assigned to:" line below the Current keys box; it probably says "(unassigned)".
• Click the Assign button at the bottom left. That puts the shortcut into the Current keys box.
• Scroll the Commands list and click on PasteFormat.
• Use the same steps to assign the Ctrl+Shift+V shortcut to the PasteFormat command. When you press the shortcut but before you click the Assign button, the "Currently assigned to:" line says "PasteTextOnly", and clicking Assign now removes that shortcut from the PasteTextOnly command and adds it to PasteFormat instead.
• (optional) Select the PasteTextOnly command and assign a shortcut of your choice to it.
• Click the Close button.
• When you next exit from Word, you may be asked whether to save the Normal.dotm template. If so, click the Save button.

I don't know whether future updates will leave the shortcuts as you set them, or change them again.

Answer 2

Microsoft has reassigned the shortcuts, as you have noticed.

This has been discussed a while back; I don't quite remember when. I didn't see it happening then on my system, but a couple of days ago CopyFormat changed to Ctrl+Alt+C and PasteFormat changed to Ctrl+Alt+V.

Below is a screen shot from my Customize Keyboard dialog box. It illustrates that Ctrl+Alt+C is assigned to CopyFormat.

Answer 3

I get a © when I attempt to use ctrl-alt-c

Microsoft has reassigned the shortcuts, as you have noticed.

This has been discussed quite a while back; I don't quite remember when. I didn't see it happening then on my system, but a couple of days ago CopyFormat changed to Ctrl+Alt+C and PasteFormat changed to Ctrl+Alt+V.

Below is a screen shot from my Customize Keyboard dialog box. It illustrates that Ctrl+Alt+C is assigned to CopyFormat.

Th

Answer 4

It may be that different languages are getting different updates.

Stefan,

Can you assign Ctrl + Shift + C to it as well?

Answer 5

I don't think that CopyFormat and PasteFormat have ever been a language-specific shortcuts (of course, I can't speak for all of the languages that are supported by Word).

For as long as I can remember, I have had Ctrl+Shift+C for copy format and Ctrl+Shift+V for paste format. It changed very recently, possibly with an Office update.

I just tested, and I am able to re-add the lost shortcuts.

Microsoft's support article about copying & pasting formats now lists the new shortcuts. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-the-format-painter-4bb415a9-d4e4-42b7-b579-170adc594e40.