How to Paste ChatGPT Text Into Word Without the Asterisks and Weird Formatting

Why ChatGPT text pastes into Word with asterisks, pound signs and broken tables, and four fixes: Paste Special, Ctrl+Shift+V, a default setting and a cleaner.

You copy a ChatGPT answer, paste it into Word, and get a mess: asterisks around words, pound signs in front of headings, a strange font, blue hyperlinks, sometimes a table that is now a column of pipe characters. This page explains what is actually on your clipboard and gives you four ways to paste clean text, from a one-off shortcut to a setting you change once.

Why the asterisks and pound signs appear

ChatGPT writes its answers in markdown, a plain-text convention where **bold** means bold, *italic* means italic, # Title means a heading and lines starting with - are a list. The chat window renders that markup into formatted text on screen. What goes onto your clipboard depends on how you copied:

• The copy icon under an answer usually copies the raw markdown. That is why the asterisks show up when you paste.
• Selecting the text and pressing Ctrl+C copies rendered HTML plus a plain-text fallback. Word takes the HTML, so you get real bold and headings, but also the browser's font, colours, spacing and link styling.

Neither is what you want. The first gives you symbols; the second gives you formatting that fights your document's styles. The fixes below either strip the formatting on the way in or strip the markdown before it reaches Word.

Fix 1: Paste Special, Unformatted Text

This is the classic Word method and works in every version.

1. Copy the text from ChatGPT by selecting it and pressing Ctrl+C (not the copy icon).
2. In Word, press Ctrl+Alt+V, or go to Home, the Paste dropdown, Paste Special.
3. Choose Unformatted Text and click OK.

Word inserts the plain-text fallback and applies your document's Normal style. Headings and bold disappear along with the junk, which is fine for most drafts because you were going to restyle them anyway. If you copied with the icon instead, the pasted text will still contain the markdown symbols, because they were in the plain text to begin with. Use Fix 4 for that.

Fix 2: The keep-text-only shortcut

Newer Microsoft 365 builds of Word support Ctrl+Shift+V as paste text only, matching the shortcut most browsers and Google Docs have used for years. If nothing happens when you press it, your Word version does not have it yet; fall back to Fix 1. Alternatively paste normally and click the small clipboard icon that appears at the end of the pasted text, then choose the Keep Text Only option (the icon with an A).

Fix 3: Make plain text the default

If you paste from a browser into Word every day, change the setting once and stop thinking about it.

1. Go to File, Options, Advanced.
2. Scroll to the Cut, copy, and paste section.
3. Set Pasting from other programs to Keep Text Only.

From then on ordinary Ctrl+V from ChatGPT, a web page or an email pastes as plain text in your document's style. Pasting between Word documents is a separate setting and is unaffected. You can still use Paste Special when you want the formatting kept.

Fix 4: Clean the markdown before pasting

The three fixes above remove formatting Word received as HTML. They cannot remove markdown symbols that arrived as plain text, which is what happens when you use the copy icon, copy from a shared link, or paste from a chat app that never rendered the markdown. For that, run the text through the AI Text Cleaner first:

1. Paste the ChatGPT text into the cleaner. It strips **, #, backticks, link brackets and horizontal rules, keeps the words, and can keep the list markers if you tick that option.
2. While it is there, the same pass replaces em dashes, removes emojis and deletes invisible characters that Word's own paste keeps.
3. Click Copy as plain text for Word / Google Docs, switch to Word and paste. Because the clipboard holds plain text, Word applies your Normal style with nothing to fight.

This is also the method to use when you are collecting several answers into one document, because you can clean each one in a second and paste it straight in.

Getting headings, lists and tables back

Plain-text paste is a reset. Here is how to rebuild structure quickly in Word:

• Headings. Click in the line and press Ctrl+Alt+1 for Heading 1, Ctrl+Alt+2 for Heading 2. The pound signs will be gone if you used the cleaner; otherwise delete them first.
• Lists. Select the lines and click Bullets or Numbering on the Home tab. Word converts leading hyphens and numbers into real list items.
• Bold. Re-apply it only to the two or three phrases that need it. ChatGPT bolds far more than a document should.
• Tables. A markdown table pasted as plain text is lines of text with pipe characters. Convert it with the Markdown Table to Excel converter, which outputs tab-separated rows. Paste those into Word, select them, and use Insert, Table, Convert Text to Table with tabs as the separator. The same rows paste directly into Excel as cells; see how to copy a ChatGPT table into Excel.

Things plain-text paste does not fix

Curly quotes, em dashes and non-breaking spaces are characters, not formatting, so they survive every paste method. They look fine in prose but cause problems if the document feeds a mail merge, a template with code, or a CSV export. The smart quotes guide explains when that matters. Invisible characters such as zero-width spaces also survive; Word does not show them even with formatting marks turned on. If find-and-replace or spell check behaves strangely on a pasted paragraph, run it through the hidden character checker.

Finally, Word's autocorrect will turn straight quotes back into curly ones as you type, and will convert two hyphens into an em dash. That is usually what you want in a document. It is only a problem for code and data, and there is a setting for it, covered in the smart quotes guide.

Quick reference

Last updated 2026-09-16. Everything on this page runs in your browser. Nothing you type or upload leaves your device.