Clean Clip Text is a small, free and very simple tool which removes the formatting of any clipboard text with a click.

So what? If you've tried to copy and paste text from a browser into Microsoft Word, say, you'll probably have noticed that the results aren't always as you expect. Sometimes you'll get all kinds of extra formatting when what you really want is the text.

One way to get around this is to launch Notepad, and paste the text there, first. Notepad doesn't actually support any fancy formatting, so you'll be left with the plain text, which you can then copy and paste anywhere you like.

Using Clean Clip Text could be simpler, though. Just click its button, and the program will look for any text on your clipboard, then strip out any formatting, so it's immediately ready for use.

It works reasonably well, too. We found it properly removed the majority of formatting from out test samples, all while consuming very few system resources (the program needed just under 2MB of RAM).

But we also noticed that some pages still had extra lines, perhaps surplus carriage returns, meaning we still had a little reformatting work to do. And as these disappeared when using Notepad, that may still be the most effective solution.