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

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.

The shortcuts could be saved in a separate Global Template which can be distributed to each user's Word Startup Folder.

I believe this is discussed in my article on Assigning Keyboard Shortcuts in Microsoft Word 2007-2021 (365).

I expect that these will survive future Office updates. However, I can't speak to Windows updates which might override everything.

Answer 3

This was announced some time ago; see https://insider.microsoft365.com/en-us/blog/paste-text-only-shortcut-in-word 

Since this was announced for Office Insiders, it hadn't been rolled out for everyone at that time. Now apparently it has been (I'm seeing the changes here, too), but the article does explain how to restore the previous shortcuts.

Answer 4

Holy macaroni I think I can actually help someone here -- I've never gotten a response to any of my posted issues so good luck but: It's not an Office issue, it's a Zoom issue. Zoom added an annoying new shortcut where ctrl + shift + c will allow you to record a video. You can disable it in Settings > Keyboard Shortcuts of Zoom. This fixes the problem in Powerpoint, should also fix it for Word/Excel.

https://community.zoom.com/t5/Zoom-Meetings/Shortcut-Shift-Ctrl-C-is-interfering-with-my-work/m-p/191270

Answer 5

It is a zoom feature that override the Ctrl+Shift+C shortcut, just go to your zoom app to disable the shortcut. you will get your copy format shortcut back. I also just resolved.