Shortcut to paste text unformatted – Autohotkey solution

Almost all computer users would use <Ctl> C and <Ctl> V keys extensively. How many times have you found yourself needing to copy a formatted text and paste it onto a different document without the formatting? I have felt the need for this very often and every time I do it, I miss a convenient shortcut for it. I find my Windows PC lacking support for this elementary feature. Of course, many softwares that host the target location have provision for this. For instance, you can copy the text from wherever you want and paste it without formatting in MS Word or MS Excel using Edit -> Paste Special -> Unformatted text. But I was looking for a universal and convenient approach to do this. Now, thanks to Autohotkey, I have managed to write a shortcut for it. I have set up 2 variants of hot keys for this -

1. Copy the text unformatted (using hot key 1) and paste it wherever you like using standard <Ctl> V
2. Copy the formatted text and paste it in unformatted fashion (using hot key 2).

I use either of it depending on my convenience. For hot key 1 (unformatted copy), I use <Ctl> <Shift> C, which is quite close to normal copy shortcut. For hot key 2 (unformatted paste), I use <Ctl> <Shift> V, which is quite close to normal paste shortcut. Quite logical, ain’t it?

Now on to the real scripting part. This is how I went about it -

^+c::
bak = %clipboard%
clipboard = %bak%
return

^+v::
bak = %clipboard%
clipboard = %bak%
Send ^v
return

As you can see the code above, the approach is very simple – Read the clipboard and assign it to an Autohotkey variable. This operation sheds all the formatting associated with the clipboard item. There is one drawback to this approach though – After you perform this, the formatting of the copied text in clipboard is gone for ever. If you want to print it somewhere else immediately with formatting, you will have to go back and copy the text again. But this is a very rare occurence, at least for me and I am quite happy with the solution I have come up with.