I asked a colleague, who uses Word 2003, to check the list of commands. He reports no "PasteTextOnly". So it's not a legacy command.



If the command was absent in Word 2003, but available in Word 2010, perhaps PasteTextOnly was introduced in Word 2007 as part of the effort to "modernize" Word by replacing menus with ribbons.

Was the Paste Options button available in Word 2003 (I don't remember)? Nowadays, the plain text (unformatted text) option is called "Keep Text Only" on the Paste Options button, so I suppose there is some logic behind the command being called PasteTextOnly.

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Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

I don't remember, either, but I think the answer is no. There wasn't anything like the "Paste Options" control built into the ribbon.

In Office 2003, there were five main ways to activate commands: by choosing a command from a menu; by right-clicking a screen object (which opened a "context menu" consisting of a vertical list of context-appropriate commands). Right clicking a screen object could also be done by giving the object focus and pressing Shift + F10; by choosing a button from a floating toolbar; by pressing a hotkey (e.g., F7 = spell check; Ctrl + U = underline; etc.); and by pressing a sequence of individual keys to interact with menus and toolbars (e.g., press Alt (or F10), then F, then A to invoke the "Save As..." dialog.) The last access method is actually the same as the first, but done via keyboard instead of mouse.

In a way, the modern "Paste Options" area of the ribbon is a little like a Word 2003 toolbar. But I don't think there was a toolbar for pasting. Creating custom toolbars in Word 2003 was easy to do. I did it all the time. But it never occurred to me to create a paste toolbar!