OneNote finally gets a popular keyboard shortcut that was missing

Microsoft OneNote has been one of the most popular note-taking apps for many years now, but it’s been missing one important quality-of-life feature—a feature that, according to Microsoft, was “highly requested by many.” Fortunately, it’s finally here!

Normally, when you paste content into OneNote, it keeps all of the formatting that it had from wherever you copied it from, whether that was a Word document, a web page, an email, a Discord message, etc. Often, it’s more convenient to paste only the text with all of the formatting (bold, italics, underlines, links, bullet points, etc.) stripped out.

Announced in yesterday’s Microsoft 365 Insider blog post, OneNote is now able to “paste text only” (also known as “paste without any formatting”) using the Ctrl + Shift + V keyboard shortcut (or the Cmd + Shift + V keyboard shortcut on Macs).

Previously, OneNote could already “paste text only” by either right-clicking and selecting the Keep Text Only option or by changing the app’s Default Paste Option setting to Keep Text Only. This update adds the keyboard shortcut, which is the same shortcut you can use to “paste text only” in other Microsoft 365 apps.

The new keyboard shortcut is already rolling out on the latest OneNote versions for Windows, macOS, and the web. If you don’t see it, wait a bit longer as the rollout may not have hit your device yet.