How To Safely Copy and Paste Text From a Webpage.

When you see words printed and displayed on a webpage, you are not viewing simply text, but Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) that also contains the text you see.  HTML is the standard coding language of webpages.  And, if within that HTML code is some malicious code (malware), you may well bring the malware along into your computer along with the text.  Also, the formatting of text for webpages is vastly different than say a Word document.  Below is a sample of the HTML code from an earlier Dispatch. 

The results of simply coping and pasting from a webpage into another format can be quite unpredictable.  What would be best is if we could strip out the HTML code from what we copied, and simply be left with the text.  Enter Notepad.

Notepad is the most of generic text editors that comes with Windows.  In Windows 11, Notepad is listed separately in the full applications list.  In Windows 10, you will find Notepad as a sub listing under Windows Accessories.

Notepad opens with a clean interface to copy your text into.

When you paste the copied text into Notepad all formatting, and other type of object that is not simply the text, is stripped out. 

And now you can format the pasted text as the is rest of the document text.

If all this seems like unnecessary steps, then you haven't heard an attorney scream when his pleading that is due by 5pm, appears completely ruined by simply copying and pasting text from any one of the online legal web portals. Ah, Good Times.  Good Times.