Most places you'd want to paste text have formatting controls at the top of the window you're typing into. E.g. this forum has "B I U" near the upper left corner. So do Word, Wordpad, and Windows Live Mail. You can just do a simple copy & paste into these, then highlight what you want to change, then click the appropriate B, I, or U to "unformat" the text. That's a lot simpler than using Notepad and is what I do.
I often paste text into Notepad to strip off custom fonts, italics, etc. so that I can paste it into word processing programs, emails, etc. in "pure" format so I don't end up having to modify fonts, etc. after I'm finished pasting.
My use of Notepad is the best technique I've come up with to accomplish this goal, but I was hoping someone might recommend a faster solution. Using Notepad this way requires the user to go through something like 9 to 10 steps for each paste job. Even though I'm a quick draw McGraw on the keyboard shortcuts and the mouse, I was hoping someone might point me to an even quicker solution.
Specifically I was hoping that Windows 7 has the capability for the user to type in a modified version of "Ctrl-C" (e.g., "Shift Ctrl-C") that would allow me to bypass Notepad entirely and basically do the same thing that Notepad does to the text (i.e., stripping off all the formatting and leaving me with pure ANSII characters to paste into programs that will automatically assign the default formats.
Anyone heard of such a keyboard shortcut, or maybe an app that works with Windows 7 to allow that kind of copying and pasting?

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