Copy, and Paste and Match Style

In this video, I will show you how you can paste and match style using copy and paste on the Mac. By default, when you use copy and paste, not only does the Mac copy all of the text that you are copying, but it also copies the formatting of that text, and it will paste that formatting into your document. Well, maybe you want to have that format and match your existing document. That’s what we’re going to look at in this video. Let’s see how we do this. Let’s go to my Mac.

Now, before we get started, I’m going to demonstrate this in Pages, but this is a macOS-wide feature. This will work in Pages, Numbers, Microsoft Word, Excel, or even Notes, but it’s easiest to show you how this all works when we’re using Pages. So even though I’m showing you in Pages, it does work across different apps.

Now, what I’m doing is I’m creating a newsletter, and I want to have a little bit of history of Apple in that newsletter. So I go down to Pages here, and then I go to New Document, and what we’re going to do is select the Classic Newsletter. Double click on it. It opens up, and now I’m looking at my newsletter. Let’s go and move this over to the left here, make this a little bit smaller, and put it over here to the left.

Now let’s open up Wikipedia in Safari. So I go down to Safari here, and we’re going to go over to Wikipedia. I’m going to search for Apple, Inc. So I just type in here, Apple Inc. And we have Apple Inc. here, and now I can get some history here.

In order to copy and paste, all we have to do is just select what we want to copy. So I’m going to go to my Apple Inc. document here. We’re going to the second paragraph here. I just triple-click in here; it selects the entire paragraph. Now I just need to copy this now. One way of copying it is going up to Edit in the menu bar and then going to Copy. But my favorite way is using Command C. If there’s one keyboard shortcut, or I should say two keyboard shortcuts that I recommend everybody learn, it’s Command C for Copy and Command V, as in Victor, for Paste. So now, let’s select this or use Command C, and it just copied that text. But in addition to that, it also copied the formatting. Anything that is bold is going to be copied. Any links are going to be copied. The text size is going to be copied. The text color is going to be copied. Let’s see what I mean.

I go over to the left here. I want to paste it in this paragraph here. It looks like it’ll fit nicely in there. So now I just click in here, and now what I need to do is I just need to paste it. So I go up under Edit in the menu bar, and then we go over to Paste. But again, my favorite way of doing this is Command V. Now watch what happens when I select this. When I paste that text in there, remember not only did a copy of the text, but it also copied the formatting. I select this, and we can see it put that formatting in there as well. It has a white background; the text colors a little different color than the rest of my document, the text size is larger than what the document was made with. So, in addition to copying the text, it also copied the formatting.

What I want to do is I want to paste that in there with the original formatting. How do we do that? Well, let’s go back up under Edit here, and we’re going to undo this. So I just go Undo Paste. When I undo it, it brings us back to where we were.

So now I want to paste that in there, paste that text from Wikipedia, but I want it to match this style. So we need to paste and match style. How do we do that? We go back up under edit, and instead of Paste, you’re going to see Paste and Match Style. When I paste and match the style, what it’s going to do is paste that text in there, but it’s going to match the style of the original documents. So it’s going to match the style of this document here. It’s going to have the gray background. The text is going to be a specific font from that document. It is not going to be the font from the original document.

So now I have my text selected where I’m going to paste it. We’re going to go up under Edit here. And then I Paste and Match Style. Watch what happens. We can see it pasted that text in there, but it kept the original format of the document.

Let’s do that again. This time we’re going to go to Apple. I select it. I’m going to go to iPad Pro. We’re going to copy some text from this marketing page here. Let’s just scroll up here a little bit, and we have this text here, so let’s select this. All I have to do is just drag, and I’ve selected that text so we can see that some of the text is bold. It’s a little different color is certainly doesn’t match what we have in this text here. We’re going to paste it in this area here. So now I just copy this. I’m going to use the keyboard shortcut, Command, and the C key; I copied it. I go over to my document here. Let’s just go ahead and scroll up here. I click in there to select it. And if I use Command V., It’s going to paste the text and the format in the original format. So I use command key in the V key, and we can see, we can’t even read that text. Because this text here is on a black background. The text is actually gray. While when we paste it in here, here, it’s gray as well, as certainly it doesn’t match the formatting of this document again.

So now, let’s go and undo this. I go back up, and then we go to undo. Now we do is we Paste and Match Style. When I do that, it’s going to match the style of this document. I go up under Edit, and then we go over to Paste and Match Style. And now we can see it matched the style of the original document. It still has all that text in there, but it just matched the style of that document.

This works across multiple apps. It works in the Notes app. It works in Textedit. It works in third-party apps like Microsoft word. This is not a Pages specific feature. This is a macOS feature.

So I can go to my Notes here. Select it. And when we go up under edit, what do you think we’re going to see? Paste and Match Style. So now I select this, and being that I had it in the title, it matched the title. If I go down here where it’s in the body, I paste it in here, watch what happens. I go up under Edit, Paste, and Match Style. It matched the style of that paragraph.

So that’s how we can paste and match style. When we use copy and paste on the Mac, all we have to do is copy our selection. We just copy it. Normally I use Command C and then when we go to our original document. Instead of just pasting it in there, we go up under Edit, and then we use Paste and Match Style. When we do that, it’s going to match the style of the texts that we copied to the document that we’re pasting it into.

So that’s how we can copy and paste to match style on the Mac.