In MS Word, choose “Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text” to paste formatted text as ASCII text. This is particularly useful when you copy text from the Web. It contains all kinds of formatting codes that you don’t want and that cause the Paste operation to drag on forever. Paste Special > Unformatted just pastes the text. There’s no default keystroke for this, but if you use it a lot, you can just create a Macro and assign a keystroke.