If you are copying text from the Internet — say, a news story for use in class (see Links, right, for sources) — you will often find that when you paste the text into Word you get unwanted formatting, largely in the form of tables.
Copying from a webpage will do that — pick up the tables that have been used to lay out the page.
Avoiding that, and getting just the text that you want, is very simple — and will be much quicker than trying to eliminate all those table cells.
Copy the text, go to your Word document, and — from the menu, not the icon — choose "Paste special" (see image, above).
Then choose "unformatted text" (see second image, above). And it's as simple as that…
To try it, go to Yahoo News, for example, copy a story, and then try both methods: paste with the icon, and then — in a new document — use "paste special".
See the difference…?