Hit a bug today that seems to have survived the transition from Office XP to Office 2007. A good quick way to clean up text copied from a web page is to use Paste Special, choosing the Unformatted Text option, when pasting it into Word. This also gets rid of unwanted graphics. I have to do this often and so recorded the sequence as a macro, triggered by Shift-Control-C.

But it didn’t work. Word translates recorded macros like this into Visual Basic, but it screws this one up. To make it work under Office XP you have to go to the Visual Basic editor (ie, select the recorded macro under the Tools-Macro menu and press Edit) and edit the line:

Selection.PasteAndFormat (wdPasteDefault)

to...

Selection.PasteAndFormat (wdPlainText)

It turns out that you need the same work-round with Office 2007, accessing the macro features via the Developer ribbon.