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At least two people want to paste with formatting: https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/17398-clipboard-history-feature-why-no-formatted-text-rich-text/ https://w
by twic 4y ago
At least two people want to paste with formatting:
https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/17398-clipboard-history-feature-why-no-formatted-text-rich-text/ https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/17398-clipboard-history-fe...
I've seen this question asked again and again. Once, i saw an answer from someone who was a product manager on a big office tool, i think at Microsoft. Their answer was that according to their user research, the vast majority of users want to paste with formatting.
Given how often this comes up, and how irritating all programmers evidently find this, i would really love to read a detailed writeup of this feature; its history, how popular it really is, how people use it, etc. It seems likely there's a big story here we're all completely missing.
- moralestapia 4y ago>the vast majority of users want to paste with formatting Oh, I highly doubt this is the case.
- InitialLastName 4y agoIf you're moving sections around in a spreadsheet or a word processor, would it be more annoying if the copy/paste kept the formatting or stripped the formatting?
- ghusto 4y agoWithin the same application and document, it can make sense. That's not what people are raging about though.
- mohamez 4y agoExactly!
- bee_rider 4y agoI think it depends on your workflow -- I'd tend to assume the receiving end has some formatting, and it would be best if the copied text was fit that formatting, rather than bringing formatting with it. Ultimately though it seems pretty arbitrary, I guess they just went with the default that benefits what they assumed would be the most popular workflow. I dunno, we should all just use LaTeX to avoid these kinds of issues.
- wintermutestwin 4y agoIn a spreadsheet or word processor, you have Paste Special which allows you to be granular about what formatting, etc comes over with the paste.
- lucisferre 4y agoI think you overestimate the majority of users' ability to make good UX decisions.
- celdon25 4y agoHow does that affect whether they will be annoyed or not when they paste something and it includes formatting that has to be removed?
- Gibbon1 4y agoI don't doubt they want to. That's not the same as they should. I think actually you have three groups. 1. Most of the people on this thread that want default text. 2. People that carefully format documents. 3. Idiots. The first two find copying the style over to be super annoying. Both have to remove it as a second step. The last don't know any better. That latter group is much larger than the first two.
- twic 4y agoOn what basis do you doubt it?
- asoneth 4y agoI've heard the same, but the story was apocryphal. Specifically that when they needed to decide which paste style should be the default "Paste" operation it was a combination of user research and a bias towards novice-friendly defaults that led them to pick paste-with-formatting as the default and paste-as-plain-text as the alternative. I'd also be interested in seeing the actual research and design rationale.